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Disney to stop console publishing, Disney Infinity canceled [Update: Kotaku article]

Update

If you’re interested in Disney Infinity, then you should definitely check out this pretty lengthy article by Kotaku. It reveals the (ambitious) plans the developers had for the series (including bigger figures, a story mode, and more), and the reasons the whole thing was canceled altogether (despite being the best-selling toys-to-life franchise).

***Disney Infinity 3.0Yesterday, Disney made a big announcement regarding its Disney Infinity series. No, the company didn’t announce Disney Infinity 4.0… quite the opposite. It confirmed what some people have been expecting for a while: Disney Infinity has been canceled. The playsets for Alice Through the Looking Glass and Finding Dory will still be released, but after that: nothing.

The problem is that, despite a strong launch in 2011, Disney Infinity wasn’t performing too well in the past few months. In fact, Disney credits it with dragging down its consumer products and interactive media division, no less.

Here’s the statement sent by the company to various news outlets:

“After a thorough evaluation, we have modified our approach to console gaming and will transition exclusively to a licensing model. This shift in strategy means we will cease production of Disney Infinity, where the lack of growth in the toys-to-life market, coupled with high development costs, has created a challenging business model. This means that we will be shutting down Avalanche, our internal studio that developed the game. This was a difficult decision that we did not take lightly given the quality of Disney Infinity and its many passionate fans.”

That statement reveals two additional things:

  • it confirms that Disney will stop publishing games themselves. Of course, there will still be Disney games on consoles, but those will be entirely developed and published by third-party developers and publishers.
  • Avalance, the internal studio that developed Disney Infinity, will be shut down. Over 300 people are going to lose their jobs.

This is quite the radical change for Disney, who has chosen to focus on mobile gaming instead of the console space. The company is also leaving behind a pretty competitive toys-to-life market, which means a bigger slice of the cake for Skylanders and LEGO Dimensions.

Source: VentureBeat

Lite_Agent

Founder and main writer for Perfectly Nintendo. Tried really hard to find something funny and witty to put here, but had to admit defeat.

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