"The ultimate goal for us is to have our best IP well established and sustainable on the videogame market," says Martin Tremblay, who worked at Ubisoft and Vivendi Games before becoming president of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment in June. Accomplishing that is a crucial first step for studios before becoming a fully legit publisher by moving into original titles.

So far, Disney is the only player in Hollywood that has already done so. After establishing girl-targeted brands like Hannah Montana and Kim Possible as million-unit-plus sellers in 2003 and 2004, it came into 2005 with a small but viable publishing operation. "This is a very disciplined company, so we were given a small amount of resources at first to prove we could be successful," recalls Hopper. "Then we were able to get more investment and just keep on growing."

Disney's C.F.O., Tom Staggs, said last year that the conglomerate is prepared to more than triple its spending on games from $100 million in 2006 to $350 million by 2012. Disney recently moved videogames out of the sprawling consumer-products unit and into a new operating division along with online media.

The revived Disney Interactive Studios (formerly Buena Vista Games) has used its capital infusion to acquire six development studios (the folks who actually make the games) since 2005, and has a slate of 19 titles for its fiscal year ending in September, significantly more than any other media conglomerate and even some pure-play publishers like Sumner Redstone's struggling Midway or Eidos.

"By the existing model, Disney is definitely in the lead. They are a good year or two ahead of Warner," observes Keith Boesky, a former president of Eidos who now leads his own videogame agency. "The question is whether one of the other studios will come up with a better way to pursue the market."

About 70 percent of Disney's games are based on existing film and TV properties like Prince Caspian and High School Musical—the bread and butter of Disney Interactive's business. But the real reason the company is willing to invest so much may lie in that other 30 percent. Its small but growing slate of original titles, which started last year with alien-exploration game Spectrobes and is expanding this fall with the stunt-driving title Pure and Guitar Hero-like music simulator Ultimate Band, are potentially more than just game properties. They're new franchises that can eventually flow through the Disney pipeline: Imagine Pure the theme park ride or Spectrobes the animated TV show.

"They're a content engine, like any other form of media," Hopper says.

Core videogame players are still largely young males, and Disney Interactive has started pursuing them with games like Pure and February's Halo-esque shooter Turok, based on a comic book about a dinosaur hunter. That's not exactly standard fare from the most conservative studio in Hollywood. "Part of our opportunity here is to connect in a relevant way with demographics groups that are otherwise harder for our company to reach," Hopper says. "It's easy to get other publishers to license our hit movies or TV shows, but if we want to invest in new customers via videogames, we have to do it ourselves."