Activision Blends Videogames, Toys in ‘Skylanders’ Franchise
Activision Blizzard’s new Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure title is the first in a range of products that blend toys with videogames in a bid to spark new interest in both categories, executives said Friday at a New York news briefing. Activision halted development of new Guitar Hero titles and pulled the plug on True Crime: Hong Kong (CED Feb 11 p6), setting the stage for a revival of its Spyro franchise to spur sales in an untapped market for products that blur traditional boundaries, the executives said. Activision acquired the Spyro franchise, which debuted on the original Sony PlayStation in 1998, when it bought Vivendi Universal Games three years ago. Nearly a dozen Spyro games based on a purple dragon have been released, selling more than 20 million units.
For Activision, which owns the Crash Bandicoot character and also has developed Spider-Man and Transformers games as well as World of Warcraft, spreading the RFID-based technology across platforms was a natural extension, executives said. Activision’s studios each will develop Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure for handheld and console game systems as well as mobile and the Internet, said Fred Ford, chief technical officer at Toys For Bob, which created the title for Nintendo’s Wii. Toys for Bob, purchased by Activision in 2005, spent two and a half years developing Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure, which will be completed by early summer, Ford said.
The heart of the system is a series of RFID-based three-inch-tall characters that, when placed on a circular “portal of power,” connect via WiFi to a videogame console, company officials said. The characters, each with special powers and features, contain DRAM memory to store game information that can be used with any portal, company officials said. The portal contains a custom ASIC, although company officials declined to release details. The characters include Spyro, a fire-breathing dragon, a gun-toting Trigger Happy who fires coins and Gill Grunt, who is armed with a harpoon gun that squirts water. They inhabit Skylands, islands in a sea of clouds on which they battle to save the world from Kaos. In all, 32 characters will be available, selling for less than $10 each, Toys for Bob said.
Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure has more than 20 levels and will fill a 4.3 GB Wii disc, company officials said. The response time for joysticks and the user interface is 60 frames per second, but that drops by half for rendering 3D scenes, Ford said. The beta version of the game demonstrated Friday still needs “smoothing” of the renderings and voiceovers haven’t been added yet, he said. In addition to Nintendo versions, Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure will be available for PS3 and Move and Xbox 360, but not Kinect, since Skylands requires a controller, company officials said.
"If this thing takes off, the applications are incredible,” Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg said. “I think there are certainly different possibilities where different kinds of toys could come to life and you could buy different game experiences. We're not just porting the console game and dumbing it down for different devices. We are actually creating different games that are appropriate for every medium."
Toys “R” Us will “aggressively” promote Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure globally this fall and will get some “exclusive elements” for the line, said Hirshberg, declining further comment. Toys “R” Us, which began discussions with Activision two years ago on the line, pushed the company to release the product earlier, but the technology wasn’t ready, Toys CEO Gerald Storch said. “I give Activision a lot of kudos for saying ‘no, it’s not ready yet,” he said.
"It’s a toy plus videogames merger and we're all fascinated by the intersection between the virtual world and the physical world,” Storch said. “For our kids brought up in this world, their imagination was always in that intersection and in that strange space between the digital and analog. It’s very natural for them to go back and forth the way this product does."
For Toys “R” Us, Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure is part of a strategy to wrangle exclusives from suppliers to separate itself from Target and Wal-Mart, Storch said. In addition to seeking deals with vendors, Toys “R” Us is direct-sourcing some products from China using an office it opened in Shenzhen last year, he told us. Direct-sourced products account for in the “low double-digits” of the merchandise Toys “R” Us carries, but will expand over time, Storch said. It will be aimed at mid-priced categories, Storch said. “We will continue growing with our principal partners,” including Hasbro and Mattel and “there is plenty of room for rising stars,” Storch said.