I dreaded this NBA Exprience coming to Disney Springs when it was first announced. As like everything Disney announces, this was suppose to be great. I laughed at the concept and was simultaneously fuming over Disney quitting on DisneyQuest. All it needed was upgrades to keep up with the constant technological advances in the gaming industry. They had the money to do just that but they decided to let it rot in obscurity. All while charging insane prices till the very end.
I believe it was done strategically on purpose. I sense the thought process behind that plan was to keep the prices up for obsolete gaming experiences so that it:
1. Enrages the hardworking guest who paid big money to enter, only to become highly dissatisfied with the offerings.
2. Enrages the guest to the point that they refuse to buy tickets to enter.
3. Enrage. Enrage. Enrage... because Disney loves pi$$ing off guests whom are vacationing with them.
Regardless, Disney wanted Quest gone. I'm sure they thought having an NBA venue in their entertainment complex would ultimately win. I never saw that happening. I hate to see things fail but I can't say I hate this failing.
And it failed... BIG TIME!
A certified slamdunk of a failure and I hope Disney doesn't continue making these weird side business ventures that end up mucking up. When did this garbage open? 2 years ago? It's been closed for over a year due to the pandemic (which they will forever pin the blame on). Before the pandemic hit us hard, it had just opened a few months prior. Am I correct?
This is just sad. Not in a depressing way. In a "damn, look at this embarrassing shiet!"
In other news, I am sad over The Holy Land closing for good.
Disneyquest as a concept was dead shortly after it started.
Their whole business plan was to pop those up around the country and spread the cost of developing new attractions and updating old ones out across all of them when doing refreshes - they knew going in that it was going to need to be kept up to date to be successful.
When their second one in Chicago failed almost immediately with consumers not understanding what it actually was*, the future was pretty much sealed because they never thought the cost for development was worth the return they could get from a single location.
In the beginning, the arcade stuff was kept in a "retro/classic" area which was a relatively small part of the overall layout but over the years as eveything else got more and more outdated, they just stuffed the place more and more with those machines they could buy and sell cheap at industry auctions, just like everyone else who works in the typical arcade space does.
It was obvious once marquee things like the comic book virtual sword fighting attraction closed (which would have been great for a SW light-saber retheme) and the area it was in tuned into additional seating space for the dining with more arcade machines around, that their plan was to run it all into the ground.
I feel like the only reason it lasted as long as it did was because it was included on one of the ticket upgrades that included water parks and mini-golf which drove attendance and that helped subsidize/justify it.
The one thing that
did appear to survive (and thrive) out of that experiment was the cookie-cutter attractions in multiple locations concept which they'd been previously reluctant to do in the parks, even when they were building the "same" attraction - HM, Space Mountain, SM, Pirates, etc., for example.
This process, of course helps them go cheap but it also means fewer unique things from location-to-location and it helps enable the runaway spending in Imagineering that often isn't reflected clearly in their end products.
A system that allows them to both over-spend and cheap-out at the same time can't possibly be good for guests, can it?
*because people at the time (outside of what was already a tourist destination) couldn't grasp that it was supposed to be more like an indoor theme park made possible through technology rather than just an arcade which is what everyone (who didn't go) compared it to. The prices were never insane for what it was supposed to be - just for what it ultimately turned into after they'd given up on the concept.
