The Disney Infinity series was a huge success, but that just wasn’t enough for its parent company
When Disney announced recently that it was cancelling its Infinity line of toys and games, and that it was exiting the video game space completely, many analysts and gamers were shocked. After all, the Disney Infinity series of toys-to-life games seemed to be doing pretty well, having sold over $200 million worth of product and taking the lead in the new category ahead of rivals Skylanders and Lego Dimensions.
But while the series might have been doing well, there were some signs that Disney still wasn’t happy. They decided to skip E3 this year – not a promising move. Then, when sales for all the toys-to-life game lines saw slower growth in the last year, it seems Disney started to worry that the entire category was losing momentum. In a recent earnings call to shareholders, Disney CEO Robert Iger admitted that his company just doesn’t have confidence that the business is sustainable.
“That business is a changing business, and we did not have enough confidence in the business in terms of it being stable enough to stay in it from a self-publishing perspective,” said Iger. “We knew going in that there would be a lot of risk with this product, and the fact that we did so well initially, gave us the confidence to continue with it. The truth of the matter is that the risk that we cited at the beginning when we went into this caught up with us.”
Plus, there’s reason to suspect that over-confidence may have led Disney to miscalculate their strategy. The company’s high hopes for toys-to-life products were high at first – but they were maybe too high, and that may have led them to overproduce product, leaving a lot of excess inventory when sales didn’t quite match up to expectations. One insider has told Kotaku as much, stating that the company just churned out way too many Disney Infinity units.
“The biggest issue with [Disney Infinity] 2.0, and probably the reason for the closure of the studio and the end of Infinity was that they made too many toys. Infinity 1.0 had a major shortage of toys. They were almost always off the shelf and manufacturing was behind by months. The expectation was that the brand would grow and they would sell more units and toys. It’s hard to put in perspective how big of a failure this was since all those additional units were added to the books destroyed any chance for 2.0 to be profitable.”
In the end, the truth is that Disney Infinity was a big success, and generated huge sales for Disney – but they seemed to be expecting even more. That compelled them to over-produce, leaving them panicking when things levelled off. It is a shame that a series that was so successful ended up getting canned; imagine if some other AAA property had huge sales, but was still cancelled because the publisher expected even more. It is just an unprecedented situation.
What do you think? Did Disney mismanage a promising franchise? Or was the toys-to-life market always going to be a passing fad? Let us know below!