Where are the smaller Disney games?

Disney is a giant megacorp, owning hundreds, if not thousands of IP that cover a wide variety of genres and appeals to a variety of audiences as well. Because of that, not every IP Disney owns best fits some huge AAA release along the lines of Star Wars Outlaws or Indiana Jones and The Great Circle.

Some IP fits well with games that are smaller in scope and in the last few years, we’ve seen some great examples of smaller games based on properties Disney owns. Disney Illusion Island, Tron: Identity, Aliens: Dark Descent and Return and Return to Monkey Island were all cool smaller titles in among giants like Spider-Man and the Star Wars Jedi games.

But this year? Smaller releases bearing the name of a property Disney owns have been virtually nonexistent. The “smallest” Disney titles we are seeing this year are remasters of games that were very popular in their time of original release such as Star Wars: Dark Forces, Star Wars: Bounty Hunter and Epic Mickey Rebrushed. Not only are those not small games, they aren’t new ones either. Most of this year’s biggest game showcases have gone by without anything that’s cool and smaller and different like Tron: Identity or even a follow-up, spiritual or otherwise, to any of the games I mentioned at the start of this piece.

Granted, both 2023 and 2024 have been a rough couple of years for the industry at large and we are seeing it in there being, while not necessarily a lack of huge releases this year, certainly lighter than we’ve been accustomed to. But games both big and small continue to come out. It’s a shame that it seems for the near future at least Disney is only interested in supposedly safer, larger bets even when those smaller games have been successful on their own merits and in many cases been well-reviewed, made top ten lists at the end of the year and won awards.

I hope this is merely a trend of an overall slowdown of game development in general that will pick back up as the industry itself picks back up and not a sign that Disney is no longer interested in licensing out their properties for anything but the supposedly safer, surer bets…

That’s all for today but we have a big release this week in Star Wars Outlaws so I will be doing my darndest to get some serious time with it and give my impressions by this weekend, most likely by Saturday, so see ya real soon!