‘All about content’
Nintendo’s weird-named, probably money printing toys, amiibo, exist. Speaking to IGN, Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime differentiated the line from Skylanders and Disney Infinity and explained their ‘crossover’ use.
“What we communicated in the Nintendo Digital Event was that Infinity and Skylanders enjoy significant share on our platforms. For both of those products, more than 50% of the volume is represented on Nintendo platforms. What is not going to happen is cross usage play of amiibo onto those platforms. And that’s because the amiibo platform is completely different. Its different in that it’s NFC-based, so that’s why we’re able to utilize the technology built right into the GamePad. Their platforms are different.
“You will see cross-platform play between the characters introduced for Smash Bros. And then be able to use these figures on other games. And we touched on that. You’ll be able to use the figures on Mario Kart. You’ll be able to use the figures on Captain Toad, Mario Party, as well as Yoshi’s Wooly World. So that’s the cross-platform play that we were trying to communicate.”
Reggie also explained how Nintendo has leaned on second party development, as well as third party, to spell the Wii U between first-party releases.
“First, we’re doing much more second-party development. Everything from Bayonetta 2, which is an exclusive to Wii U game, Devil’s Third is an exclusive to Wii U game. Certainly, leveraging more second-party development is critical to us. The other thing we’re doing is much more with independent developers. And I would argue that this is a big industry shift that’s happened over the last couple of years.
“You look at all of the developers that have left the large major third-parties to create their own small studio. We’ve been able to attract them not only with some of the tools made available, like Unity. But also the fact that these developers love having their content merchandised in our eShop right alongside Mario and right along Zelda versus putting them in separate area with all other Indie content. We merchandise it along with all of our other key games, which really helps the sell through of this independent content.”
Nintendo President on Amiibo crossovers, the software drought, and more [IGN]
