Why didn't Marvel and Star Wars save the game?

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Why didn't Marvel and Star Wars save the game?

Postby Tilarta » Mon Sep 19, 2016 6:53 am

I am wondering why the integration of Marvel and Star Wars into Disney Infinity didn't ensure the continuation of the game.
They are fairly powerful fanbases, so I thought that either of them alone would boost the game's revenue, combined they would be an infinite resource of support.
I have some theories at the moment.

1. They had no interest in playing a game that was clearly aimed at a younger demographic.

2. It wasn't the standard kind of game, exploration, missions, content updates.
And then we get into the Egotripper kind of gamer.
This gamer only cares about bragging how good they are, how many players they have killed in PvP, it goes on and on.
Since Disney Infinity isn't an BlusterBuffer game, they wouldn't have cared.

3. They just didn't have enough variety in characters.
Marvel has an endless supply of characters, it seems they didn't even scratch the surface of that untapped potential.
And the exclusion of X-Men and Fantastic Four might have been a major factor.
Basically, from a Marvelite's point of view, they couldn't find their favorite, so they were disinterested and didn't make any purchases.

Disney's offerings might also have been a bit limited.
There were hardly any of the old standards, the characters/franchises who made them what they are today.
So that might have been another reason for lost consumers.
For example, a dedicated Little Mermaid fan checks the catalog, discovers there is no Ariel figurine or Little Mermaid playset and doesn't buy the game as a result.

I can't speak about Star Wars, since I am not very knowledgable there.
 
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Re: Why didn't Marvel and Star Wars save the game?

Postby Sheriff Woody » Mon Sep 19, 2016 7:52 am

at launch much was said about this being like children playing with real toys and using their imagination. how many children when playing with real toys would insist that their favourite toys couldn't play together at the same time? none.

not just limited to Marvel and Star Wars ... marketing the product as having infinite possibilities but then not allowing different properties to mix together in play sets has always been the biggest issue.
 
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Re: Why didn't Marvel and Star Wars save the game?

Postby Tilarta » Mon Sep 19, 2016 8:55 am

I couldn't find anything official, but I did find some info that said version 4.0 would include "unrestricted" playsets.
That anyone could play anywhere.
Mr Incredible, Iron Man, Elsa and Sabine Wren all in the same playset?
Load them into the game and have fun breaking the fourth wall to smithereens!

So I assume if we'd been given time, that one negative factor would have been removed.
The very fact they acknowledged this issue and were planning to fix it is evidence that they were listening to their fans and giving them what they asked for.

Me personally, I always treated Disney Infinity as a "future investment" kind of game.
It doesn't have what I want right now, but it might/or will in the future.
As the saying goes, all good things are worth waiting for.
 
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Re: Why didn't Marvel and Star Wars save the game?

Postby rogpalmeruk » Mon Sep 19, 2016 9:15 am

I think the addition of Star Wars & Marvel helped the game go to a broader audience of kids, especially the boy market with Star Wars/Marvel, lots of male figures, (they totally messed up with not having enough females from Marvel).... the problem i see is they couldn't attract teenagers/young adults to infinity as it was deemed a kids game... they might be been cool figures, but the vast majority of teenagers etc would want a full "adult" friendly version like Marvel vs Capcom, Marvel Heroes, Spider-Man etc, rather than what was a kids choice.... also take away the parent power, young adults/teenagers might have been put off with the price..... for something that didn't deliver a AAA experience for Marvel or Star Wars fans.... had they done it the other way around, marvel in 3.0 and star wars in 2.0, star wars wouldn't have competed with Battlefront which took all the older star wars fans away.... i still think the problem with 2.0 was the focused on bringing in marvel fans at the expense of appealing to their Disney audience who had brought in.... i also think they put too many eggs in one basket, throwing everything into infinity left them open... not a surprise to see star wars and marvel weren't taking that risk, how many marvel and star wars games do we know about in development compared to disney?
 
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Re: Why didn't Marvel and Star Wars save the game?

Postby GermanBoldItalic » Mon Sep 19, 2016 4:10 pm

Marvel, to my knowledge, was actually one of the reasons that Disney Infinity was cancelled. It seemed like Marvel pushed for less popular characters to join the lineups and those characters did not sell well, which led to the creating Marvel Battlegrounds. Marvel Battlegrounds was playable with every Marvel figure to help boost sales of the figures which were clogging up shelf space. I also seem to recall the same problem with the Star Wars Rebels. No one was really buying them because there wasn't much to do with them.

Personally, I think the idea around Disney Infinity being more interactive marketing than anything else was the game's downfall. Disney's library of classics is its biggest asset and was largely ignored. Sure we got characters for major film releases like Hiro, Baymax, Spot, Nick Wilde, and Judy Hopps, but we had nothing to do with them. I don't necessarily think each should've had a playset, but each launch should have included several downloadable toy boxes to use them in, similar to the character adventures in 1.0.
 
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Re: Why didn't Marvel and Star Wars save the game?

Postby Tilarta » Mon Sep 19, 2016 5:05 pm

I only found two results for in development titles regarding Marvel games, a console only Spiderman game (no details available, game due out in 2017) and a Telltale games production.
Telltale games do some nice work, but their games tend have a few drawbacks.
The primary one is the shortness of the story, you get 1 hour per chapter of their game (the games are segmented into chapters, released once per month, usually a total of 5).
The second is that they are quicktime event based, you lose the game if you don't hit the right key at the right time and you aren't given much of it!

The most recent Telltale Games one I played was Tales of the Borderlands.
Your very first task is to remember every detail of a complicated monologue, then repeat it word for word to another character.
And if you don't choose the correct response before the timer expires, the game chooses for you.
By the way, the game rewrites the story based on what you choose, so you don't get the time to think about which way to go or even if you picked the "correct response".
There are some wrong ones by the way, so you have to choose the right ones in this scenario, otherwise the character starts to grow suspicious about the dialogue, because you are contradicting the facts he has already been given by the monologger.

All other results I got was just adding additional content to existing titles, such as Marvel Heroes and the myriad assorted mobile games that survived the termination of Disney Interactive.
Of those, Marvel Heroes is the one that gets the most and frequent updates.
But I would not recommend that game to anyone and in point of fact, I am avoiding it because of the negative experiences I have had.

As regards Star Wars:
Visceral Games is working on a unspecified project, nothing is known yet besides a target date of 2017.


@GermanBoldItalic
I could have sworn every character that Marvel pushed out were the well knowns.
In my personal experience, they didn't explore the B list heroes or villains at all.
White Tiger as an NPC/Power disc is probably as close as we got to a B Lister being acknowledged.

And I did notice that the only time they added Disney content was when a big "new movie" was due out.
I can't help but wonder if the lack of complete sets and the accompanying playset crystal was also a factor.

In Big Hero 6, we only get two members of the team and a power disc, not the complete set.
I personally would have paid for a Gogo Tomago and a Honey Lemon.

Likewise, Zootopia, no playset either.

It's almost like they thought we would only buy merchandise if it was linked to something very much in the public eye at that moment.
If it was an older film, it wasn't worth the effort.
 
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Re: Why didn't Marvel and Star Wars save the game?

Postby crazybirdman » Mon Sep 19, 2016 5:22 pm

Remember the Avengers ARE Marvel's B-list heroes. They are more popular now due to the movies, but Spidey, X-men and F4 are their top characters.
If I remember correctly the game developers hands were tied in many ways when it came to characters, playsets and gameplay. So it's not that it wasn't worth the effort, it was more a question of could the get permission from every company that had a stake in that characters.
 
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Re: Why didn't Marvel and Star Wars save the game?

Postby Tilarta » Mon Sep 19, 2016 5:41 pm

I thought invidually on their own merits, each Avenger was an A lister.
Well, I have my doubts about Thor and Captain America, I have a suspicion that those characters are pushed into the limelight by Marvel, because they want them to be the most important ones.

I think really, Iron Man is the only one who did stand on his own, since he's had his own franchise for a long time now.
By extension, that puts War Machine up there too, as he is part of Iron Man.
Sometimes he even went solo.
And well, we didn't get a War Machine despite the fact he was in those movies too!
But if I was to say the names Rescue and Bethany Cabe to you, without using a search engine, do you know who they are?


X-Men was a desired inclusion of mine, but hypothetically, if they'd gotten the approval, who would they have chosen for playable characters?
You'd most likely get Cyclops, Jean Grey, Wolverine and Colossus, because those are the ones they choose most.
So right off the bat, they've just lost 75% of their sales to me, since Colossus is the only one I would want.
When it comes to X-Men, I'm more interested in the B list, the ones who don't get featured often, like Emma Frost, Kitty Pryde (comes with Lockheed as a teammate), Laura, Mercury, Surge, to choose a few.
Emma Frost is the one I am most surprised doesn't get included more, because in the command structure, she's number 2, just below Professor X.
Surge's ommision is also puzzling, because she's Cyclops' protege, specifically, she's a trainee X-Men team leader.


But that comment about older franchises was more in reference to the old Disney standbys, Little Mermaid etc.
For that matter, why is there no Kim Possible?
That's more recent and much loved.
And they could have done a whole line of Lilo&Stitch experiments, even if they only picked the most frequently appearing ones, that's still around 6-10 possible figures to sell.
If you added Lilo, Nani, Jumba, Pleakley to that lineup, you've got a few more to sell.
Gantu, not sure if he could be a candidate, due to his extreme size difference.

And now I'm imagining Nani surfing in Moana's playset.
Because that would just be so fun, shooting the curl in between a flotilla of canoes!
 
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Re: Why didn't Marvel and Star Wars save the game?

Postby GermanBoldItalic » Mon Sep 19, 2016 6:17 pm

@Tilarta

Disney Infinity had trouble keeping 1.0 characters in stock so they made A LOT more for 2.0. Two million Hulk figures were produced but only managed to sell 1 million. I think that could be because of the exclusive deal they had with Playstation for the first few months. By the time Hulk was available to the general public, everyone had completed the Avengers play set and there was no real reason to go back and play as Hulk. I think the same thing had happened by the time Loki, Yondu, Falcon, and Ronan had come out. Not to mention that each of those characters didn't have the greatest of movesets.
 
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