• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Disney Infinity Canceled; Disney Exits Console Publishing; Avalanche Shut [Statement]

GAMEPROFF

Banned
I believe this years game sold the least of any Skylanders title, but this year had more competition. So it's tough to know what caused the poor sales. Lack of interest in Skylanders, the competition, a less liked game concept...or all three.



Disney were beating Skylanders. Infinity was the top selling T2L. It just didn't sell enough (to keep shareholders happy).

"All of that Star Wars has helped drive Disney’s bottom line. According to Pachter’s estimates, Disney has sold over $200 million of Disney Infinity Star Wars games and toys this fall. That has catapulted Disney DIS -5.16% ahead of Activision Blizzard’s ATVI -1.99% Skylanders franchise and the new Warner Bros. TWX 0.86% Games’ LEGO Dimensions game in the lucrative toys-to-life category. Pachter estimates Skylanders and LEGO Dimensions each generated $150 million in sales this fall."

http://fortune.com/2015/12/30/star-wars-video-game-sales/
Do we have actuall numbers? I dont trust estimates from Patcher.
 
Wait a second!

Does this mean MvC4 is possible now? Edit: Disney opening/curating its development groups was a main reason why MvC2/3 had to be pulled, correct?

Surely, with a move to licensing its IPs, this means those titles and its sequel(s) will be allow life again?
 
The way Disney handled the Infinity stuff always seemed like the worst option of the big three. Considering the characters under Disney's control, I can't help but feel that they wasted and made so many wrong and bad decisions with it.

Still, striking news.

Basically this.

After the first waves I wasnt bothered to buy any more figures. And here you have Nintendo, and I stil do it.
The figure slection was mostly crap, and its a pity becuase of the history Disney has with their own characters.

Too bad for Avalanche though. Hope they landed on their feet.
Lots of bad decisions coming from Disney lately. Only Disney animation seems to have some good decissions right now. Theme park and other media wise, the thing is going into the crapper becuase of some stupid suits. It feels like a small repeat of the Eisner era.
 

SpotAnime

Member
So the hundred million dollar question now is... Is this just the first domino that falls on TTL as a genre, or is this just a new opportunity for those that are left?

Pachter said the TTL segment wasn't shrinking, if anything it's remained flat despite new players entering the business. So that means some of the established brands gave a little to the new ones, but on the whole the segment was solid.

In the US, Wii, X360, Wii U have been the biggest platforms for TTL to date. Xbox One and Ps4 are actually quite close, but haven't yet exceeded sales of the old gen, even now.

That makes sense given the market for TTL - younger players are likely to remain on previous generation platforms, which are cheaper and also have a larger base. So I would fully expect to see platforms selling in the last three years of their generation to sell more than those in the first three. It's a bigger market, easy as that.

The other question would be to look at the total sales across all platforms (old and new gen), and compare year over year to see how the segment is selling. If Pacther is correct, then you should see relatively flat numbers in sum.

Lego seem super weird. Walmart has all the non level pack figures 40% off and there seems to be more weeks when they're on sale than not.

Target had a 75% off deal for all Lego Movie and Chima packs I used to get all of those lines. At that price they were cheaper than actual Lego solo minifigs.

...

I don't know if it's smart not to release a new game and bundle considering those $100 starter packs could be had for $40 less than 6 months after release.

But that's no different, even when Skylanders was the only game in town. It seems from the get-go Activision's business model was to sell high from the onset, and heavily discount throughout the life of that particular version, until the next release, and so on and so forth. Razor and blade situation, get people to buy into the base game, sell them figures perpetually. TTL must have higher margins as well, because they have sustained the lower sale prices for years.

You must be thinking Marvel Playmation, which has also been killed.

I don't think they announced that. Only that Disney Infinity was written-off and Avalanche was closed. Playmation wasn't in the announcement. Disney Interactive will still continue, albeit just to oversee licensed product I imagine. Johnny V might still have a job at DI, who knows.

I've been pretty bearish on large media outlets getting into gaming.

There's been a pretty consistent trend from the mid-90s of failed attempts. Virgin, Disney (the first time, then the second time, then the third time, and now for a fourth time), FOX Interactive, Universal, Sony Imagesoft. Some of these failures are worse than others. But generally, video games are not hugely profitable for these companies and so they end up flip-flopping between "we need to get into gaming, if we have a hit it'll be huge and think of the brand synergy" and then "we need to get out of gaming, too high cost, too hit driven, we should just take the easy licensing cash".

One of the challenges is that as budgets increase, when these companies get into gaming they largely buy up studios to build up. Disney bought Avalanche, Black Rock (Climax Racing), Wide Load, and Junction Point in addition to picking up the EA Canada refugees for Propaganda. They also bought a lot of early mobile talent. That's a lot of talent to tie up and disrupt for a pretty futile goal. I can't say that these studios would have been stable or healthy without Disney's intervention, so maybe this is not a satisfying criticism, but to some extent it feels more tragic when an acquisition is shut down than when an independent studio fails to make it. Maybe the only silver lining of Disney's participation in gaming has been their post-licensing pivot after the LucasArts acquisition. I feel like both the future of LucasArts properties and the back-catalogue handling have dramatically improve, so kudos there. Hope that if they wind down Disney Interactive that they keep their licensing folks on.

WB has been a notable exception to my thinking. I think getting Midway for a song was probably good. I think having some early hits in the form of FEAR (and I guess to a lesser extent Condemned) and the unexpected smash success of Arkham Asylum helped make sure that WBIE is willing to do stuff that's either not licensed, or that is treated with some care. And the TT Games stuff has been managed pretty well from what I can see. So I'm comparatively bullish on Warner's chances. Plz don't go under, WBIE.

It's hard when it's not a core business unit. EA, Activision, Ubisoft - those companies can stomach development like this, because it's what they do. Disney was always going to treat it like a second child, because theme parks, studios and networks were going to get the attention and the money. As long as those were doing well, they would fund non-core business units like DI, which was probably more like an experiment to see what kind of revenue it could generate more than a staple of its future. Shareholders would likely see the spend across the board and say, why spend money on this business segment when it's marginal at best, when you can take that money and make another blockbuster movie with bigger returns? Or a new theme park ride? Or a new hotel?

It's a shame, because Disney would make a great publisher, but it's attention is elsewhere. That's also why you don't see Comcast jumping in, but rather licensing. WB is an isolated case, maybe big media companies can look at them and emulate for success. WBIE had revenue of $2.2 billion in 2015. EA, in comparison, had $4.5 billion in revenue in the same year. DI probably isn't anywhere near that, and was by all accounts healthy last year.

Interactive was the only business segment to not grow its revenue in fiscal 2015. Gains in Disney Infinity sales with the release of Disney Infinity 3.0 were more than offset by a decline in its mobile business. After watching so many mobile-gaming specialists crash and burn it's probably not a surprise to find that smartphone gamers are fickle.

However, Disney's interactive arm still managed to post a double-digit percentage increase in operating profit. The same can't be said about the business segment that deserves the dishonor of being Disney's worst arm for fiscal 2015: media networks.

Disney Interactive, in comparison, does about $200-$250 million per quarter in revenue, so about half that of WB.

WBIE has around 5-10k employees; DI has around 2k.

Disney has a market cap around $173B; WB has a market cap of around $58B. WBIE has a bigger share of the overall cap than DI does with Disney. And that's why I believe all this has happened as it has. Not as much to do with the sales or health of Disney Infinity itself.

FYI none of this is financial advice. I'm just reading what's been reported.

Shazaam, out of work just like that. If anyone needs a 3D/2D artist contractor, I have lots of free time now! Drop me a line.

https://www.artstation.com/artist/mutatedjellyfish

And thanks for playing, everyone. We were far from perfect, but we really did try.

You guys did, and it's been much appreciated. Thanks for the years of fun my family and I had with the games.
 
At least the final releases will have another figure based on Johnny Depp portrayals.

disneyinfinity-blog630-jpg_180556.jpg


latest


There being no Mace Windu figure is a tragedy.

And what about this being probably a suit decission when classic DISNEY characters not being even present?
Where's freaking Goofy for godsake!
 
This rumor would very well be true for a couple reasons.

1. Remember Reggie announced amiibo support in Disney Infinity and Skylanders when announcing amiibo at E3 2014? Only Skylanders happened but a year later.

2. These:

3DS_DisneyArtAcademy_case.jpg
N3DS_disneymagicalworld_boxart_01.jpg


The former is a direct collab with a Nintendo IP (Art Academy), the latter is a localization of a Bandai Namco-published game.

I think Nintendo and Disney could be extremely powerful allies in the gaming industry if done right. Even better if Nintendo also allows Disney to make CG Nintendo IP movies with their Feature Animation division.

Bringing this post back because welp, Nintendo just announced Disney Magical World 2 for NA.

3DS_DMW2_logo_FPO.JPG
 
Pachter said the TTL segment wasn't shrinking, if anything it's remained flat despite new players entering the business. So that means some of the established brands gave a little to the new ones, but on the whole the segment was solid.

He was talking about 2015 year as a whole, and the flat for the year was despite Star Wars and Dimensions entry, and with Amiibo having a full year of sales compared to a partial year in 2014. All that happened last year was share shifting when, given the additions to the market, it should have seen significant growth. Q1 this year did not grow over last year. This is not what I'd think of being "solid".

Plz don't go under, WBIE.

That would definitely suck.
 

Lernaean

Banned
As a Marvel fan, DI figures were the best i could get in my hands. I'm very sad that's all we are getting.
No need to talk about people losing their jobs. That's terrible.
All in all, I wasn't expecting that. I was certain it had a few more years of life in it.
 

Poona

Member
Does this include the Star Wars line? I was thinking about trying to collect some of those.

Yes, especially sad there too as they had another Star Wars playset and figures getting released this year. Not sure what they would involve though. Maybe Rogue One related? Wonder if we'll ever see the gameplay and figures they were working on but ended up being scrapped.
 

SegaShack

Member
I really wanted a play set for Pinocchio, Snow White, or Peter Pan. I really enjoyed the first game despite a few issuses, but I did not like how quickly they moved to a sequel when the director of the game kept calling it a platform that would expand to include more disney characters.
 

prag16

Banned
If you're going to make a major announcement like that as part of an earnings call, telling employees like social media teams beforehand generally wouldn't be done. Not saying that's what happened here, but controlling the messaging is a big part of earnings calls.

Well, having something like that go out on social media IMMEDIATELY before the call isn't exactly "controlling the message".
 
The problem is the market is kids and the older Disney properties, while still popular, aren't expected to sell as well as figures for current properties. So Disney lined up releases with movies, although that was hit and miss (Cinderella anyone?).

Wasp we could have expected to get alongside the next Ant-Man movie, Captain Marvel the same.

I completely agree the lack of Disney Princesses was a huge mistake. If you want to broaden your market, that's a massive opportunity right there. Each version of the game should have had a new Princesses playset.

However, in all of this, there was a limit to how many figures they could flood the market with. They chose to go with the zeitgeist, rather than nostalgia. I think that was a sensible decision...to a degree; and to be honest, Infinity was doing well enough for any normal business, just not well enough for Disney.

But see the problem then was that they didn't do crap for new stuff either.
Wreck-it Ralph - just 2 figures
Frozen - just 2 characters and a 3rd added 2 games later
Maleficent - just a figure of the version of the character many didn't like compared to the classic No Aurora either.
Cinderella - well liked movie, no figures even more disappointing considering they kept the classic look.
Big Hero 6 - just 2 characters of a team
Inside Out - good support
Good Dinosaur - just a figure
Jungle Book - just 1 figure
Into the woods - nope

So really Inside Out and Lone Ranger are the only modern core Disney properties that weren't afterthoughts.
 
Well, having something like that go out on social media IMMEDIATELY before the call isn't exactly "controlling the message".

The point is that the social media team probably weren't the first people told of a huge decision like this. It's not one hand not knowing what the other is doing with that tweet about upcoming releases meaning it all being chaotic and mismanaged. It was likely vey managed. The social people and dev probably had no idea what was coming when they showed up to work yesterday. I don't know what point you're trying to make.
 

Bojangles

Member
This sucks. Hard to believe this wasn't making enough money. The number of platforms supported probably hurt.

I hope that servers stick around. I love playing in the toybox with my kids. My daughter has never enjoyed gaming as much as she has as Maleficent in the toybox.

I guess we're stuck with more licensed bejeweled clones from now on.
 

Crash331

Member
This sucks. Hard to believe this wasn't making enough money. The number of platforms supported probably hurt.

I hope that servers stick around. I love playing in the toybox with my kids. My daughter has never enjoyed gaming as much as she has as Maleficent in the toybox.

I guess we're stuck with more licensed bejeweled clones from now on.

AH crap, I didn't even think about the servers shutting down and losing all that user created content. This blows.
 

IzzyF3

Member
Wow, I thought Infinity was outselling Skylanders at this point, but still no go, huh...

The quality of the figures rose dramatically in 3.0. Too bad that's the end of that.
 

LiK

Member
Wow, I thought Infinity was outselling Skylanders at this point, but still no go, huh...

The quality of the figures rose dramatically in 3.0. Too bad that's the end of that.

I think they sold well but probably the costs of development and manufacturing exceeded what they were selling.
 

FyreWulff

Member
Wow, I thought Infinity was outselling Skylanders at this point, but still no go, huh...

The quality of the figures rose dramatically in 3.0. Too bad that's the end of that.

Welcome to publically traded companies. You can be doing well, but unless you can project 3000% YoY Growth for the next 10 years, you're as good as dead to the day traders.
 
But see the problem then was that they didn't do crap for new stuff either.
Wreck-it Ralph - just 2 figures
Frozen - just 2 characters and a 3rd added 2 games later
Maleficent - just a figure of the version of the character many didn't like compared to the classic No Aurora either.
Cinderella - well liked movie, no figures even more disappointing considering they kept the classic look.
Big Hero 6 - just 2 characters of a team
Inside Out - good support
Good Dinosaur - just a figure
Jungle Book - just 1 figure
Into the woods - nope

So really Inside Out and Lone Ranger are the only modern core Disney properties that weren't afterthoughts.

Because Inside Out (Pixar) and Lone Ranger (Deep) were safe bets (even if one of them bombed hard after). New franchises are a challenge to work with, there are huge developing costs so why they are forced to play it safe. That is why there were no Frozen playset (considered for 1.0 but scrapped for Lone Ranger, no one foresee its sucess), no Big Hero playset (Marvel stuff were given focus), no Aladdin (old stuff). Right it is easy to point their mistakes after you have everything in place, after the movies release. But could we really blamw them?

Other stuff: Angelina was the reason for the Malificient figure, that iscwhy no classic look. Good Dinosaur was not a safe bet, even for Pixar (did not make that splash either). Plus big dinos does not translate to DI figures, so Spot was the only option. Releasing Spot means Mowgli would be too similar. Also Jungle Book film has a realistic approach, while DI is cartoonish. Translating the movie characters to DI would kill them. Releasing the classic animation look figures would also confuse the costumers. Compromissed solution? Release only one iconic character. Could not be Mowgli, so Baloo.

Also at the beginning the management was afraed of releasing Disney Princess and any girl stuff because DI was seen as a boys toy. Wrong aproach that the development team was slowing correcting.
 
Infinity were the most expensive figures, right? Even with that, they had the biggest IPs in the business, I wonder what the profit margins on these things are. I don't believe Activision, Nintendo, nor Disney have disclosed this.
I think Nintendo mentioned that some actually lose money, IIRC while others make a small profit depending on their simplicity.
 
Wow, I thought Infinity was outselling Skylanders at this point, but still no go, huh...

The quality of the figures rose dramatically in 3.0. Too bad that's the end of that.
To me they started getting good in 2.0. 3.0 included more details which was neat.
I am mostly really sad my dreams of a Simba figure are dead.
 

deadlast

Member
This really sucks, as it's my autistic daughter's favorite game and really what got her into Disney. I guess it wasn't selling as well as I thought, because I figured it printed money. Very disappointing.

Changing shit on kids with autism is never fun.
I'm lucky, my autistic son only loves the figures. I was able to snag up the Hulk Buster and Ultron figures for 4 bucks each at Bestbuy. We didn't have the 3.0 version. I was worried he would get upset by not having the game, but he hasn't asked for it.

I'm hoping I can keep getting figures at a discounted rate.

Also, I wish disney would have just changed the business model to focus on the action/play packs. They could have kept churning those out to make a profit.
 

Bazza

Member
Wait a second!

Does this mean MvC4 is possible now? Edit: Disney opening/curating its development groups was a main reason why MvC2/3 had to be pulled, correct?

Surely, with a move to licensing its IPs, this means those titles and its sequel(s) will be allow life again?


Have to say this was the first thing I thought about when reading the first post, so hopefully a silver lining.
 

Doc Holliday

SPOILER: Columbus finds America
http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/01...lar-toys-to-life-series-thanks-to-star-wars-2

From January this year...

Catapulted by both anticipation and Star Wars: The Force Awakens' release in December, Disney Infinity Star Wars games and toys have raked in over $200 million in sales this fall.

Thanks to revenue from the Disney Infinity: 3.0 The Force Awakens play set, released on the same day as the film, the franchise has now passed both Skylanders and LEGO Dimensions in the toys-to-life category, according to Fortune. In December, John Vignocchi, VP of production at Disney Interactive Studios, confirmed the game's number-one ranking in the genre.
 
Exactly. This is the problem when you need to keep shareholders and the market sweet. Making money isn't enough, you need to meet expectations. They didn't so they decided to cut their losses.

Yes. It is like why you are spending x to get a 10% profit when you could spend x in another business and get 20%.
 

PSqueak

Banned
Especially white Tiger as the Spider-Man set was low on characters had no females and she is like 2nd in command on the first 2 seasons of the show the set is based on

This was incredibly weird to me too, it was the only set from 2.0 to not come with a female character packed in, even 3.0 had all the sets come with a male and a female character with the sole exception of marvel battlegrounds with came with only one character.
 

KingV

Member
Bringing this post back because welp, Nintendo just announced Disney Magical World 2 for NA.

3DS_DMW2_logo_FPO.JPG

Nintendo and Disney together would be a phenomenal fit. Nintendo to make Disney games and Disney to help manage the media portion of Nintendos IPs.

Talk about an opportunity for some great Disney games and also some half-decent Nintendo movies.
 
Damn, outta nowhere! Didn't they just released some sort of planning of upcoming stuff?
Such a shame, as 3.0 was really fun to play.
Welll.... There goes my dream of one of the best licences they have becoming a playset, The Muppets.
 
Top Bottom