Nintendo turned a few heads and inspired a few sighs earlier this week with reports that it would be selling figurines that would interact with its future games. Many believed Nintendo would continue to take a passive stance in the video game world by following in the wake of someone else's success, in this case Activision and the $2 billion it sees from the Skylanders series.
However, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said in a Q&A with investors that this is not the case. Indeed, Nintendo is making figurines similar to those found in the Skylanders and Disney Infinite games, but Nintendo will not be making any one singular piece of software for the toys to interact with. It will instead focus on "different approaches or ways to appeal to consumers."
"As for utilizing character figurines, Activision has released video game titles from the Skylanders series over the past three years and Disney Interactive released the software title, Disney Infinity, last year…Both video game series are compatible with character figurines and have created an extremely large market for these products. In the overseas markets especially, a huge amount of space has been allocated to those product lines at retail stores with a large market presence…
…Our primary focus, however, is not to develop software that is compatible with figurines. Rather, we have been developing figurines since last year because we believe there may be different approaches or ways to appeal to consumers by using them, and this could also be one way for Nintendo to utilize its character IP."
Nintendo has shown how the toys interact with both with the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, so some form of software will definitely be involved. Whatever it is though, don't be expecting Nintendo to make any clones in the near future.
