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PlayStation vet John Drake to head up games biz dev and licensing at Disney

PlayStation vet John Drake to head up games biz dev and licensing at Disney

Games industry vet John Drake has found a new home at The Walt Disney Company.

The PlayStation America alum has moved to the House of Mouse as VP of biz dev and licensing for the entertainment giant's games business and will be looking for developers and publishers to work on Disney-owned IP.

Prior to joining the entertainment behemoth, Drake spent five years at Sony, initially being hired as director of portfolio strategy in 2014. He was promoted to global head of portfolio strategy and content acquisitions in July 2017. Before that, he spent seven years at Rock Band maker Harmonix.

Drake's hire comes shortly after speculation from shareholders that the company should buy games firm Activision Blizzard in order to give Disney some in-house games expertise. PCGamesInsider.biz actually looked at whether this would make sense for the House of Mouse

That being said, Disney boss Robert Iger has said that the licensing model is working for Disney right now and that it has no intention of bringing video games to its forthcoming streaming platform

Disney currently works with third parties including Electronic Arts and Square Enix for video game based on its IP, turning to the aforementioned two companies for Start Wars and The Avengers respectively. 


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PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Forbes-Calvin is a freelance writer and photographer, mostly operating within the games industry. Over his career, he has written for the likes of MCV, Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, The Observer, VGC and Esquire. That's on top of writing books for Dark Horse on RuneScape, Assassin's Creed, Dead Island 2 and more.