Scene from Cars 3 trailer
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The DeanBeat: How Warner Bros. rescued Avalanche Studios after Disney buried it

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 5 min

Disney and Warner Bros. have taken very different strategies in video games, and Avalanche Software, the decades-old Salt Lake City development studio, was caught in the middle.

The results of the different strategies were visible this week, when Warner Bros. announced it had hired half the team at the Avalanche Software studio — which Disney had shut down — in order to make a Disney Pixar game based on the film Cars 3.

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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.