Disney confirmed the closure this evening as part of a larger round of 250 job cuts in its consumer products and digital media unit.
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Disney continues to look toward licensing their properties for games instead of developing them internally which was the cause for some of the cuts at Interactive this time around. It cut 300 jobs in May when it got out of the video game publishing business, scrapping its Disney Infinity-branded console games business, resulting in a 7 million charge against earnings in the second quarter ended March 31.
More recently, 30 people were laid off at its Maker Studios division, a branch responsible for its output of digital videos.
The move comes as Disney shifts to licensing characters to video-game producers rather than making games itself.
The first Marvel game had a successful four-year run, but the sequel, “Marvel: Avengers Alliance 2”, was shut down after failing to meet “performance expectations”, a Disney spokesperson said, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Further layoffs were at the firm’s consumer products division in California and occurred as a result of redundancies caused by Disney combining the segment with its interactive assets past year. The unit’s third-quarter profit slid 7% to $324 million.
While small for a company of Disney’s size (180K employees), small-sized layoffs have been frequent at the company in recent months.
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The job cuts were reported earlier Wednesday by the New York Times.
