Nintendo has revealed that it intends to release its own take on the Skylanders/Disney Infinity genre of games. Nintendo will release figurines of its characters that will leverage near field communication (NFC) to combine video games and real world toys.
The Nintendo Figurine Platform (NFP) will work with the Wii U GamePad’s NFC capabilities in addition to a special portal for 3DS to be released in 2015. The figurines will be used across multiple game titles with the NFC being able to read and write data to enable players to “customise [their] NFP to raise or train [their] own Nintendo characters” according to Nintendo President and CEO Satoru Iwata.
Iwata also said, “[NFP] has been designed to be compatible with multiple software titles for Nintendo platforms. The figurines, which consumers can buy and collect, are going to work with multiple software titles to be released in the future, and we are aiming to develop more software titles compatible with the figurines.”
During the meeting, investors were given a demonstration of a Mario figurine interacting with three potential Wii U games as noted on Nintendo’s website. Skylanders was the first game to successfully combine real world toys and video games and is now a billion dollar franchise for publisher Activision. Disney Infinity takes the idea established by Skylanders and brings with it the stable of Disney’s IP — which now includes Marvel and Star Wars — which has helped to shift some 3 million units since launch.
While maybe not as strong a brand as Marvel or Star Wars, Nintendo has a deep well of IP to draw on, a fact it is acutely aware as Iwata notes. “Nintendo has a lot of well-known character IP that has originated in video games, and we have been regularly releasing titles from game franchises that make use of this character IP,” he said, adding “This is why I believe a brand-new type of platform will be born when the character IP becomes compatible with NFP.”
More on Nintendo’s NFP project is expected to be unveiled at E3.
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