Don't think I can spend a whole four hours on this though.
Watching now. It's a small detail in the grand scheme of things, but Disney not providing their guests access to Disney+ on the TV for their $6000+ room is one of the most absurdly stingy things I've ever heard.
It's amazing how, despite every other disaster, this to me sticks out more than anything as the clearest sign that this whole thing was fucked from the start.also they own the channel it's not even an expense right???
Putting AD FREE Disney+ in all 100 guest rooms would have been a $1,400 a month expenditure. This is around the same price as a single normal night stay at the hotel for 1 person.
Does Disney+ come with your room at Disney hotels?
I had a few friends go to it and they said it was one of the best things they had ever done.Did they tell you if/how did they interact with the LARPing elements?
But they are hardcore Star Wars fans, so...
We already have the answer to this. Because the next time they did something like this it was a physical land. With avengers campus they had the whole land concept. But they wanted money now so rather than fully launch they decided they could just open shops, food, and a quickly cobbled together budget attraction and then drop in the good attraction later.
I can see exactly how it happened. They had some great app designers come in and figure out how much an epic app-based experience would cost. It would be some huge number, but totally within Disney's budget. Park construction takes longer than app dev, so they have the time too. But then corporate finance comes in and keeps changing and ruining things. It becomes more expensive, but Disney has money so it's ok. But they don't realize it doesn't just cost money, it costs time. So they are a few weeks out from the park opening and they have to cut everything and cobble together something stupid in a short time to avoid delaying the park. They'll fix it later (they never do) or make it up with marketing & sales teams (shockingly effective, but not enough in this case).
Finally they decided to kill the whole project and start over. Will they learn for the next one?
Rocco from Mega64 talked about the video a bit over the weekend and he said he mostly agreed with the things she brings up, but he thinks that because he went much later (like two weeks before it shut down) theyd had time to fix some of the things that werent working the way youd expectthe app worked perfectly, the actors played along with the characters he and his friends made up and remembered those names the whole time, etc
Rocco from Mega64 talked about the video a bit over the weekend and he said he mostly agreed with the things she brings up, but he thinks that because he went much later (like two weeks before it shut down) theyd had time to fix some of the things that werent working the way youd expectthe app worked perfectly, the actors played along with the characters he and his friends made up and remembered those names the whole time, etcMy friends went right before it shut down too, so maybe that's why they had a better experience.
We already have the answer to this. Because the next time they did something like this it was a physical land. With avengers campus they had the whole land concept. But they wanted money now so rather than fully launch they decided they could just open shops, food, and a quickly cobbled together budget attraction and then drop in the good attraction later.
But with the land already open, they have the increased physical park capacity, they have all the things in place that generate revenue. So with no incentive to build an attraction from a financial standpoint they just dont.
The only entertaining ones of the bunch are the little stage show on the catwalk and the spider-man stuntronic.
Yup. Avengers Campus is honestly terrible. There's NOTHING there but shops, a bunch of honestly underwhelming live performances, and a lame pay-to-win ride (Guardians doesn't count imo, it was there before the land was).
They needed to charge like 2-3x the rate they did to provide a much more intimate and customized LARPing experience that these true die-hard fans would really enjoy. Otherwise it's like going through an escape room with a hundred strangers who all might ruin your time.
I wonder if they did a "Closed Beta" of sorts, where they invite people representative of their target market to actually go through the whole experience. Feels like at least some of the problems that Jenny Nicholson went through could've been found earlier.The only people Disney "tests" stuff with these days are their influencer crowd and paid celebrities. At least for high end or high demand experiences.
The Dr. Strange show is honestly terrible. I think it was geared for young children but falls flat to everyone.Oh god, the Doctor Strange show was miserable. It was completely humiliating to watch. That poor actor paused after every magic trick to make time for audience applause and was met with dead silence. Like, a part of me wanted to think maybe it was simply because it was mainly meant for children and I was just not a part of the target audience, but I don't even think kids would like it (the ones that were there at the show I saw definitely didn't). If you're a kid who likes Marvel and Doctor Strange you'd want to see him fighting badguys and shooting lasers, not performing lame sleight-of-hand tricks like a birthday party clown.
The only people Disney "tests" stuff with these days are their influencer crowd and paid celebrities. At least for high end or high demand experiences.Yeah that sounds likely. I might sound harsh and prejudiced but even if they wanted to give real feedback I doubt they have the necessary perspective, point-of-reference, or cognition to give insightful feedback.
And it is rare for that crowd to give real feedback. They are almost all unpaid shills.
Disney has been known recently to disinvite or skip over inviting traditional press.
The actors and cast need those systems to work as expected. They can't just improv their way out of every issue.
You wouldn't catch that with testing either unless you had a testing group that is the size of an actual group of people in the hotelWhich they definitely did with test simulations. You can even calculate it with napkin math (X mins per interaction * Y guests) but obviously they had a more sophisticated model and used monte carlo or something. I'm sure they also tested a bunch of possible guest numbers until they found one that worked best for feasibility and profit, and that's what they built the hotel around, and decided the # of storylines and NPCs. But they just couldn't execute on the theory, and/or the design was messed with too much.