Chris Heatherly of Disney (left) and AJ Glasser of Facebook at GamesBeat 2015.
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Chris Heatherly explains Disney’s wild ride in mobile gaming

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 10 min

Disney has the best entertainment brands in the world, and it has been a player in the modern mobile gaming industry for years. But it hasn’t had a ton of success, and its strategy has bounced around.

But more recently, it has had some big hits like Frozen Free Fall, Inside Out, and Star Wars Commander. On top of that, Disney’s Club Penguin game has been well received as it shifted from the web to mobile. At the same time, Disney’s resources to make mobile games are not infinite. Disney recently sunset a hundred mobile games that had reached the end of their commercial lives. Chris Heatherly, senior vice president of Disney Mobile Games, is the one who has to make the calls about which games to pursue, and which to leave behind.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.