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Forced to leave your virtual home?
"It never achieved scale. It was promotional. There was no business model attached to it. It had a small but passionate audience." (Disney, Steve Wadsworth)
It is a novelty that a virtual world closes its doors in the face of its eager members. Such closure is currently happening at Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom, which is effectively shutting down as of today, despite growing protests. As Worlds in Motion reports: “passionate audience has gathered nearly 20,000 signatures for an online petition protesting the service’s termination. Other fans of the MMO have gone so far as to write letters to Disney chief executive Robert Iger imploring him to cancel the closing. Disney has so far not announced any plants to extend the service past today.”
VMK was a Shockwave-based online resort developed by Sulake (operator of Habbo Hotel) with a strong resemblance to Habbo Hotel, even though more limited. Nonetheless the virtual world could gain some traction in the past years, with the most recent report about its userbase (2007) claiming 1 million player characters. Disney seems to have another perspective though, as Disney Internet Group president Steve Wadsworth explains, “It never achieved scale. It was promotional. There was no business model attached to it. It had a small but passionate audience.”
Disney Internet Group, according to its spokesman John Spelich, hopes that users will migrate to Disney’s other virtual properties: “At Disney, we’d rather do anything in the world than disappoint a guest. But we hope our VMK players will choose to sample some of the other ways to engage with Disney online through disney.com or through virtual worlds.”
It will be interesting to see if this is really going to happen after such forced removal, since disgruntled members of VMK’s target-group can choose from a crowded field of competitors by now.
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