From pcworld.com:

Say you’re in movies, your growth models frittered away to break-even, and an industry pretty much symbolized by a butt-stomping plumber is effectively cleaning your clock — whats a corporate dinosaur to do?

Easy: If you cant sufficiently milk em, depose em.

The Wall Street Journal reports thats essentially what Disney did when longtime Pixar partner THQ came pitching license rights to a Toy Story 3 game tie-in. Thanks but no thanks, said Disney and Pixar, opting instead to handle creation of the game due in 2010 in-house.

Youve heard plenty recently about how game sales were up 43 percent in 2007. Weigh that against box office revenues — up a paltry 4 percent over the same period, and even then by way of ticket price inflation, not viewer growth. Home video sales — still bigger bucks than gaming, but not by much — were actually down 3.2 percent.

So when the authors of the WSJ piece suggest that “it isnt clear yet whether the media companies have the stamina to become serious competitors to heavyweight game publishers,” Id probably swap “stamina” for “inclination.” Companies like Disney have oceans of stamina for substantial year-over-year revenue growth, and nothing suggests gaming wont be nailing that metric for years if not decades to come.

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