Disney Online is hoping it will attract more players with the new content for its “Pirates of the Caribbean Online” game that it unveiled Friday.

According to an estimate from the online game-tracking Web site MmogChart.com, the game had only 10,000 active subscribers as of the first of this year. Disney says that estimate is far from accurate.

Disney does not release figures about the online game’s subscribers, but a spokeswoman said the company is “very excited” about them. The game was a “major factor” in the record 27.5 million unique visitors that the Disney Online network tallied in January, the company said.

The game launched in late October.

A figure of 10,000 subscribers would represent much less than a 1 percent market share of all online multi-player gamers, behind dozens of other games.

New features in the revised version of “Pirates of the Caribbean Online” include options to customize characters with new hairstyles, tattoos, jewelry and clothing.

In addition:

• Characters can communicate with other players by laughing, clapping, crying, flexing and dancing.
  A “Looking for Crew” feature lets players announce that they’re looking to join a crew of adventurers.

Disney Online said it plans more new content later this year:

• A “Black Pearl” boss battle;
• Expanded ship customization;
• Extended story lines;
• New enemies; and
• New challenges.

For more information about the “Pirates” game and Disney’s strategy for appealing to pre-teens in a massively multi-player online role-playing game, or MMORPG, see the article “Disney wants your child online” on the ArsTechnica Web site.

The author, Ben Kuchera, finds the game enjoyable, but worries about whether it’s really appropriate for that young audience. He states, for example:

As a game, Pirates is fun, I’ve played it on a number of evenings, and getting a crew together to sail around while other players man the cannons against the Navy ships is a blast; the game really takes off with the naval battles in a way that’s very different from the normal walking-around battles. When you play with a group of people it’s even better.

Disney has created a fun game, and although I have misgivings about some of the content, it’s free to try. If you play with your child, I don’t think there is much to worry about in the long run; as beginner MMO’s go, things could have been a lot worse. More worrisome is the inconsistent frame rate. Although the system recommendations are low, for some reason I ran into single-digit frame rates in places for reasons I couldn’t determine.

The idea of a selling a massively multiplayer online RPG to a younger audience may sound like an easily-attacked one at first, but Disney doesn’t make money by following trends, and children are always a huge market. People may be buying less music, but don’t tell that to lines of kids hoping for Hannah Montana tickets or tweens buying High School Musical products by the bedroom-full. It may be impossible to take down World of WarCraft, but what is possible is creating a new market; as the Wii proved, when you can’t attack, expand. And the television ads for Pirates of the Caribbean online have only just begun to air.

Disney’s MMO craze isn’t ending here, either; the Cars MMO is already on the way.

(This post was updated March 1 to include references to the Ars Technica article. It was updated again March 3 to include Disney’s response.)

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Disney, Games and gaming companies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.