Skylanders

» see skylanders.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

skylanders spyro's adventure shipped on october 13 2011 with a peripheral nobody had seen before in the console category. the box contained a usb-connected plastic disc called the portal of power, a starter set of three figurines with rfid chips in their bases, and the game itself. you placed a figurine on the portal and the character appeared on the screen. you bought another figurine and got another character. the entire business model was on a single page.

this was activision's revival of the dormant spyro brand. toys for bob, the studio behind the original star control games, built the system. by 2013 it was activision's third-largest franchise by revenue, behind call of duty and world of warcraft. by 2015 the franchise had crossed $3 billion in sales and sold over 250 million figurines, which is a number that does not parse until you remember every birthday-aisle endcap in target had a skylanders shelf for five years straight.

the trouble started with skylanders imaginators in october 2016. by then disney infinity had been cancelled (may 2016), lego dimensions was selling poorly, and the toys-to-life category as a whole had cooled. imaginators sold 66,000 copies in its launch month, a small fraction of what the prior games had moved. activision pulled the brand out of its annual release calendar in 2017 and never put it back. toys for bob got reassigned to call of duty and crash bandicoot work.

i missed skylanders. it was a kid-facing console franchise sold at retail in countries with strong toys-r-us footprints, and turkey had neither the console install base nor the toy-retail infrastructure that fed the category. by the time my own peers in tech had kids of skylanders age, the franchise was already winding down.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the design did one clever thing. the figurine's rfid chip wrote your save data back to the toy, so taking a figurine to a friend's house meant taking your levelled-up character with you. for a kid this was a magic property. for activision it was a recurring-revenue engine because each new game came with new figurines and the old portal still worked, so the install base of figurine-buyers only grew.

by skylanders trap team in 2014 there were over 175 figurine variants in the world, each at $10-15 retail. parents who had been told this was a thirty-dollar console accessory in 2011 found themselves four years and three hundred dollars deep in a plastic-figurine subscription they had never consciously signed up for.

~ the unraveling ~

the saturation hit twice. inside skylanders it hit because the figurines stopped being collectible and started being mandatory, and parents began to push back. outside skylanders it hit because every other publisher launched a toys-to-life competitor (disney infinity, lego dimensions, amiibo) into the same shelf space, and the kid-attention budget had already capped out.

activision did the math on imaginators' launch month and pulled the franchise off the release calendar. they did not announce a discontinuation. they just stopped scheduling a new title. ring of heroes, a mobile rpg spinoff in south korea, ran from 2018 to 2022 and then shut down. the main franchise has been in cold storage since.

~ the long tail ~

microsoft acquired activision blizzard in january 2022. bobby kotick said in interviews afterward that microsoft had interest in reviving old franchises including skylanders and guitar hero. nothing has shipped. the portal of power requires a usb-a port and the games require a console generation now two cycles back. a revival would need to be ground-up rebuilt, which means it would not be a revival, just a brand reuse.

the figurines outlived the franchise. ebay still has thousands of them at a few dollars each. for a generation of late-millennial parents the small plastic figures are an artifact of a specific window when the console industry tried to sell physical collectibles as software dlc, and briefly succeeded.

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