When you’ve produced the biggest-grossing film 
of 2010 to date, you earn a little R&R.
Darla K. Anderson chose to take that in Kauai, her favorite of the Hawaiian isles, after “Toy Story 3,” which has grossed north of $1 billion worldwide. Batteries recharged, she’s now deciding what her next project will be at Pixar — and toward the top of that list is sweet revenge.
Steve Wadsworth, president of Disney’s 
Interactive Media Group – the division overseeing video games, online virtual worlds and the company’s mobile efforts – has resigned after an 11-year tenure with the company.
The departure leaves a vacuum at one of the company’s most important – but often troubled – divisions.
[Gamasutra’s new editor-at-large Chris Morris examines the curiously abrupt end of Acclaim’s 9Dragons, which stranded 1.5 million U.S. players — 
when a game struggles in the high-risk MMO market, the players end up losing out, too.]
Nobody saw the end coming for 9Dragons – especially the players.
A post in the game’s Acclaim-operated forums, which went up just hours before the U.S. servers shut down, was the only official notification.
While Disney might be one of the biggest forces in the film and television 
industries, it has always been something of an also-ran in the gaming world. Despite a deep catalog of characters and properties to draw from, the company has licensed out potential hits to other publishers and focused mainly on the kid and tween market.
That’s changing fast these days. The company has tripled its investment in video games and staffed up to over 1,200 people (notably bigger than Microsoft’s internal game-building team). It’s also bringing on high-level talent, like industry legend Warren Spector (Deus Ex) and Bungie Studios co-founder Alex Seropian (Halo).
Video games and Hollywood have always been the Woody Allen and 
Soon-Yi of the entertainment world. They’re together forever, but the fit has always been an odd one – and a little creepy at times.
The amount of ink wasted bemoaning the sheer volume of crappy movie-based games is copious – and I promise this isn’t more of the same. In fact, for the first time games and movies may have found a good way to co-exist.
Rumors started last month that Apple was making a hard push to begin offering 
streaming rentals of recent television programming for 99 cents. Now those whispers are beginning to solidify a bit.
Bloomberg reports that the Cupertino-based company is in advanced talks with News Corp. for 99-cent rentals – and CBS and Disney are engaged in similar discussions with Apple.
Disney’s $563 million purchase earlier this month of Playdom 
had its skeptics, but a new survey showing the reach of the social game market could silence the deal’s critics.
The NPD Group, which tracks the sales of video games, reports that 20 percent of the U.S. population has played a game on Facebook or some other social network in the past three months. That works out to 56.8 million people tending virtual farms or collecting virtual bugs.
“FarmVille” has sure grown a lot of gamers. A new study by The NPD Group 
finds that 20 percent of the U.S. population has played a game on a social network at one point or another. That works out to 56.8 million Americans.
Thirty-five percent of those players are new to gaming, having never previously experimented with any form of video game.
For the better part of the last year, game industry pundits have shouted from the rooftops that social network gaming was the next big thing – but it’s starting to look like even they underestimated just how big it would be.
Major media companies, traditional game developers and more are gobbling up the developers of Facebook and MySpace games – and the price tags are escalating at a startling pace.
Following several days of rumors, The Walt Disney Company 
has confirmed that it has bought social game developer Playdom, a move that dramatically expands the company’s footprint in one of the fastest growing segments of the video game world.
Disney is paying $563.2 million for the company – as well as a performance-linked earn out for investors of up to $200 million. That’s a substantial premium over the $400 million Electronic Arts paid for Playfish, a larger company in the space, last November.
Chris Morris: Journalist 