It was announced earlier this week via the Disney Interactive website that Disney Infinity and its products are being discontinued. Avalanche Software, the studio who developed the installments for the series, will also be shutting down as a result.
Disney’s addition to the ‘toys-to-life’ genre seemed indestructible. I would argue that the game mechanics weren’t 100% solid, but the toy box game play was fun and the character figures straddled the line of nostalgically bringing old Disney favourites to life while also releasing new content based on new Marvel and Star Wars movies. Hey, even I have shelled out for several of their figures based on character appeal alone.
That being said, there’s a lot more competition in the genre nowadays and it seems even Disney’s ownership of familiar and much beloved characters wasn’t enough to keep the sale numbers as high as they would have liked. But perhaps this range of available characters, often thought to have been the series’ core strength, ended up contributing to the downfall of Disney Infinity in the long run. While character figures from the Incredibles and Frozen were often in high demand and missing from store shelves, the same can’t be said for the Lone Ranger characters or Yondu, a Guardians of the Galaxy character who inexplicably got his own figure. Oversights such as this were possibly the final nails in the Disney Infinity proverbial coffin, and while the shutdown of a studio is no laughing matter, I get some amusement from picturing a Raider’s of the Lost Ark style warehouse filled with Disney’s unsold Yondus.
While the series prepares for its discontinuation, there are still a few more bits of content for fans to enjoy. The final products we’ll see from Disney Infinity will be three new characters from Alice Through the Looking Glass later this month and a Finding Dory play set which will be released in June.
