R.I.P. CLUB PENGUIN

Acquisition by Disney (2007)

Although the three Club Penguin co-creators had turned down lucrative advertising offers and venture capital investments in the past, in August 2007, they agreed to sell both Club Penguin and its parent company to for the sum of $350.93 million. In addition, the owners were promised bonuses of up to $350 million if they were able to meet growth targets by 2009. Disney ultimately didn't pay the extra $350 million, as Club Penguin missed both profit goals. At the point when it was purchased by Disney, Club Penguin had 11–12 million accounts, of which 700,000 were paid subscribers, and was generating $40 million in annual revenue. In making the sale, Merrifield has stated that their main focus during negotiations was philosophical, and that the intent was to provide themselves with the needed infrastructure in order to continue to grow.[] By late 2007, it was claimed that Club Penguin had over 30 million user accounts. In December of that year, The New York Times asserted that the game "attracts seven times more traffic than ".Club Penguin was the 8th top social networking site in April 2008, according to Nielsen.

After Disney's acquisition, Disney Interactive had four MMOs to simultaneously juggle: , , , and Club Penguin, with set to follow soon. Lane Merrifield assured GlobalToyNews at the time that "it's a lot of worlds to manage, but we have really strong teams"; his role changed to taking a backseat from daily game design, and he instead focused on overall branding and quality control of the virtual gaming properties. One of his roles was to merge the Club Penguin studio New Horizon Interactive in Kelowna (renamed to Disneyland Studios Canada) with Disneyland Studios LA. He noted that DSC focused on one product deeply (with such features as multilingual versions), while DSLA focused on customer products and franchises of a wide selection of games; he helped cross-pollinate those cultures.