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jarrod on 18 January 2011
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silicon said:

I agree that Wii is a good fit for Epic Mickey. But I also think Mickey Party would have sold well. 1 million. Maybe if they did a Mickey Sports or something similar. Or Disney World Sports. 1 Million isn't unreasonable. There is an audience for those games, which may not completely overlap with Epic Mickeys audience.

One thing Epic Mickey showed was that Mickey's brand isn't as strong as they thought. Which was why there was the immediate press release blaming the camera controls, which I don't think have anything to do with sales.

With resepct to KH, I said a certain audience. I.E. Many young gamers did not grow up watching Mickey mouse, they didn't have mickey mouse club or anything like that. Most shows on the Disney channel are not even cartoons. KH hearts leveraged the FF brands to encourage younger gamers or gamers who were more familiar with the FF fantasy world, and introduced them to the disney world.

I think you're vastly overestimating the potential for a "Mickey Party" title.  To keep the Kingdom Hearts comparison going, it was the previous sales high watermark for a Disney IP sales wise, and the best initial NPD record that series has was only 646k from Kingdom Hearts II.  That's just barely less than half what Epic Mickey sold it's first NPD (1.3m).

1m lifetime US probably wouldn't be an unreasonable figure for a Mickey branded Mario Party or Mario & Sonic clone, but there's pretty much no way in hell it would do 1.3m 1st NPD like Epic Mickey has, no matter who Disney got to make it or how much advertising they threw at it.  Hell, Nintendo's own older console Disney games (Mickey's Speedway USA, Magical Mirror starring Mickey Mouse) combined have even come close to that figure... again there's more at work than the brand, more than the built in audience.

And in the US at least, I think you can probably credit KH more with introducing young Disney fans to Square games than you can the reverse.  It might be different in Japan and Europe, but then the American KH market is larger than both of them combined.