• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Activision wanted to team up with Nintendo for Skylanders

Hindsight is 20/20 so I don't necessarily blame them for passing on this. BUT I am amazed they didn't react after it's success was proven. I assumed they were going to try something considering the WiiU's NFC capability but here we are a year and a half later and nada.
 

tebunker

Banned
I love how everyone can armchair WBC this one with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.

Also I hate interviews like this because they don't tell you who at Nintendo they were working with. Was it an actual decision maker? What was Activision asking from Nintendo.

Yeah it is easy to look back and say man what a missed opportunity but we are not privy to but a smidge of the details. It does suck for Nintendo, and you have to wonder if the person making the decision had all the info and foresight, but this happens all the time.

The Exec who passed on the Beatles and said they wouldn't make it in the US was damn near right and still had a massively successful career.


And like others have said the real issue is that Nintendo has moved slowly and poorly to get in on the NFC gaming trend. Seriously a legit Pokemon game would crush with collectible toys. As would almost any kind of Nintendo IP crossover game.
 

wrowa

Member
Sometimes Nintendo can be dumb as fuck. Let's look at them announcing their own Skylanders kind of thing at E3 -- at a point in time way too late for it to actually matter anymore.

I love how everyone can armchair WBC this one with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.
In the past decade, Nintendo lived off the promise of innovation and unique features. If they aren't able to recognize that a new concept that's being proposed to them could be a gold mine, their whole business strategy is faulty.
 

Sendou

Member
Apparently not a problem for Monster Hunter and Dragon Quest! I doubt those came cheap.

That's not an answer to the question whether it's enough or not :p I agree that two RPG's is a pretty small amount. More moneyhatting Nintendo, please!

Also this is like hindsight the thread. I don't think anyone would have agreed 5 years ago that Nintendo needs help of Activision of all companies to create a figurine based (Spyro) game. That sounds absolutely ridiculous even looking back at it as a success.
 
Nintendo likes to sustain properties for over 30 years by keeping the quality high for every release.

Activision likes to bleed whatever hit property they have dry because they are an awful game company.

I really doubt Nintendo would ever want to work with them.
So quality.
3DSPokemonRumbleBlast.jpg
 

Toxi

Banned
That's not an answer to the question whether it's enough or not :p I agree that two RPG's is a pretty small amount. More moneyhatting Nintendo, please!
Nah, moneyhatting is dishonorable. It's more honorable to buy up studios and then have them make exclusives for you.

Honor matters because reasons.
 

Elija2

Member
Is easy for us to look back with 20/20 hindsight and declaim Nintendo for passing on what would ultimately have been a profitable partnership, but we should be able to recognize it was a risk and understand why they might have passed.

It sure seems a lot less risky that making the GamePad the default controller for the Wii U.
 

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
Nintendo likes to sustain properties for over 30 years by keeping the quality high for every release.

Activision likes to bleed whatever hit property they have dry because they are an awful game company.

I really doubt Nintendo would ever want to work with them.

You know they did actually publish Activision's music game Sing Party.
 

Omega

Banned
Amazing that people are trying to act like Nintendo didn't fuck up here.

Once again, they refuse to acknowledge third party and rely soley on Mario and Pokemon.

Once again they prove they are not the innovators like some (most?) nintendo fanboys like to say.

One again they shoot themselves in the foot for some stupid reason.

Say what you want about Activision or the quality of Skylanders, but it's a pretty huge game. There's even adults playing it. Now imagine if the only place to play that was on the Wii/Wii U. It would have sold more systems, which is something Nintendo desperately needs with the Wii U.

but hey its fine. They'll make a Pokemon one! they only have to compete with Skylanders and Disney Infinity, and Disney is including Marvel characters now. We all know how successful you can be when you're late to the party against two huge names, especially one of those names has Disney characters and Marvel Characters, two of the biggest properties right now.

but wait they won't do that, because then it'll make their handhelds pointless since you can play a superior version of Pokemon on a console. There's a reason in 15+ years they haven't made a real Pokemon game on consoles
 

Musolf815

Member
I'm not surprised. For the past 2-3 years, Nintendo hasn't been very good at reading the market.

With this in mind, I really wonder how/if their leapfrog strategy will pay off, is "non wearable" tech really the two steps ahead of the curve they predict it is?
I am still really confused asr to what QoL is gonna be. I know we know nothing, but I really have no idea what it could possibly be.
 

18-Volt

Member
They went to the wrong place. They should have gone to NCL Kyoto headquarters just like n-Space did back in time. NoA is just a plain distrubitor now, they don't have the right to make any calls. International offices of Nintendo are nothing more than shadows of NCL.
 
That's the weirdest thing about this, you reminded me that the Wii U already has NFC. Why if not for a game like Skylanders??
Depending on what stage of Wii U development they were in, one possibility is they were thinking "This is something we're planning on building into Wii U. If we jump the gun and make it a Wii peripheral, we lose that as a reason for people to upgrade." Of course, as it turns out what happened was it became even less Wii U-exclusive.
 
Probably one of those things that just looks bad in hindsight, may be not so much at the time, imo.

But isn't that the exact kind of thinking that Nintendo had and has been pushing so much? Thinking outside the box. People thought a controller that looked like a remote would flop too, and look how that turned out. Skylanders on its own seemed risky because at that time Spyro's name had been ran into the ground and all the other characters were new. But an action game full of Nintendo characters where you need real figures to generate them in game? That would seem like easy money.

I doubt they money hatted DQ, Monster Hunter yeah probably but Dragon Quest is always going to be on the best selling platform.

Then why wouldn't Dragon Quest X release on PS consoles given how well MMO's seem to do on them?
 

Pociask

Member
Apparently not a problem for Monster Hunter and Dragon Quest! I doubt those came cheap.

They also are funding Bayonetta, and funded Wonderful 101.

On the Western side, they helped with... Lego City? I know they did some promotion of Zombie U, but that was pretty limited (surprising, since it was the only game really showcasing the Gamepad at launch).

I think it's hard to fit this into a narrative. Nintendo only liked Japanese third parties, unless it's a kid friendly Western franchise like Lego, but not a new kid-friendly toy-based franchise like Skylanders?

And for those saying why take a chance on Spyro, those excerpts show pretty well Activision was hoping they could get a much more prominent Nintendo character to front the series - but Nintendo said nope. Easy to say they were wrong in hindsight, but man, so right up Nintendo's ally - kid friendly, sell an extra peripheral, and you get to sell actual toys too? What's not to like for Nintendo, the self-described toy company?
 

zhorkat

Member
I can't imagine how big the moneyhat Nintendo would have had to produce to make Skylanders a Nintendo-exclusive franchise.
 
A Nintendo-exclusive would have changed the shape of the project considerably, as well as adding the complexity of a business partner with a reputation for desiring granular control. It was a disappointment, at the time. Now, it looks like a fortunate escape.

Seems to sum it up quite nicely. Nintendo only hurt themselves. Activision likely made out better because of Nintendo's reluctance all things considered
 
But isn't that the exact kind of thinking that Nintendo had and has been pushing so much? Thinking outside the box. People thought a controller that looked like a remote would flop too, and look how that turned out.
Sure, but thinking outside the box doesn't automatically lead to "Do everything you're not sure about."
okayfrog said:
Consistently misses targets, had a massive price cut several months after launch?
 

obonicus

Member
So three or four years ago Nintendo passed because they have their own figurine game coming out? Coming out this century or next? Brilliant decision to pass on all that money so they could continue to pass on money many years later with a copycat idea that still hasn't materialized.

That's the most astounding part. Disney had time to launch and design their own toy-based game since Skylander's launch, and have already announced their expansion into Marvel toys. Nintendo's going to go third and they won't even be the 500-pound gorilla IP-wise anymore, not when compared to Disney.
 
I don't think it was wrong to not team with Activision, I think it was wrong to not release their own NFC till now especially with the capability already built into Wii U.

Why should Nintendo have had Activision benefiting from their IP'S? It isn't the game itself that's great (most opinions are it's pretty standard) it's the concept of using toys with your games. You don't need a specific developer to use that concept, see Disney Infinity.
 
I can't imagine how big the moneyhat Nintendo would have had to produce to make Skylanders a Nintendo-exclusive franchise.

Why would they have had to moneyhat anything? Activison came to them because they were nervous that it wouldn't work. They weren't looking for some moneyhat from them. They wanted to use their IP's because they knew how strong their characters were.
 

foxuzamaki

Doesn't read OPs, especially not his own
I don't see what's so strange about this. It was a risky partner venture. Nobody gave a shit about Spyro, why would they buy plastic toys? Clearly they were intrigued but ultimate decided the venture wasn't for them. They still gave it a ton of cross-promotion.

Yeah the comments are weird.
 

Apenheul

Member
I find it hard to form an opinion without knowing what this deal between Activision and Nintendo would've looked like. What was in it for Nintendo except exclusivity (didn't the first two Skylanderd games sell the most far and away on Wii anyway?).
 

Pociask

Member
Speaking of not fitting pre-existing narratives, check out how evil money grubbing Bobby Kotick reacted to the Skylanders pitch:

When Activision CEO Bobby Kotick hosted Toys for Bob's internal pitch for the game's release, he only made one suggestion. It was not a popular one with executive underlings seated around the conference table. He wondered if the developers could use another year to polish their idea.

"He said, 'this game is okay now, but I think it could be amazing in another year'," recalls Reiche. "Every single person underneath him said, 'we disagree, it should go out this year,' because all their plans was based on the money that it was going to bring in and the teams it would free up. He just went [bangs table] 'nope'."
 

marrec

Banned
a huge missed oppurtunity. Skylanders could have been alot bigger if it leveraged nintendos ips.

I'm not sure if it would have been any bigger though, because it's already huge. I'm imagining the Wii U release completely differently with a Skylanders exclusive at launch.

I would definitely own a Wii U at this point were that the case.
 

Toxi

Banned
Amazing that people are trying to act like Nintendo didn't fuck up here.
???

They did fuck up. Most people are just saying that they understand why Nintendo fucked up. If you asked me whether a post-Year of the Dragon Spyro game with collectible figurines would be a mega-hit before Skylanders, I would have laughed at the idea.

but wait they won't do that, because then it'll make their handhelds pointless since you can play a superior version of Pokemon on a console. There's a reason in 15+ years they haven't made a real Pokemon game on consoles
The reason there hasn't been a mainline console Pokemon game is that it wouldn't sell. Being on a console doesn't really add anything to Pokemon.
 

impact

Banned
I doubt they money hatted DQ, Monster Hunter yeah probably but Dragon Quest is always going to be on the best selling platform.

Yea that explains why the only consoles SE released a MMO on are Wii and Wii U. Makes perfect sense.

You're crazy if you don't think they forked over a ton of cash for Dragon Quest.
 

Justified

Member
Just another karma blow from the days where Nintendo strong armed 3rd parties with tyrannical and draconian policies......
 
I don't think anyone could have predicted skylanders would take off, to "fully" play the game you need most of the characters right, like some areas are locked off or need to have a specific character to enter, that idea seemed like RL DLC imo so i can see why Nintendo backed off.

But then again, if it were exclusive it might have failed too, who knows really. thats life basically, gotta take the risk

semi off topic
I bet cartoon network will have a skylanders type game coming out soon, look at all the characters they can use , hell they can just use adventure time characters and call it a day.
 

efyu_lemonardo

May I have a cookie?
They went to the wrong place. They should have gone to NCL Kyoto headquarters just like n-Space did back in time. NoA is just a plain distrubitor now, they don't have the right to make any calls. International offices of Nintendo are nothing more than shadows of NCL.
Does it say in the article that NCL weren't involved?

Activision knows who calls the shots..
 

Mumford

Member
What's stranger is that Nintendo didn't immediately start work on their own version of Skylanders after they saw the success of that game. There's no game like it in sight from Nintendo despite the fact that they have the strongest characters in the industry for a project like that.

Pokemon Rumble U is their (unsuccessful) version of this, right?
 

Kriken

Member
Hindsight is 20/20, although I do have to wonder why Nintendo, of all companies didn't want to try out something not seen as normal in the gaming market back then.
 
So much this. A Nintendo exclusive Skylands concept with Nintendo IP would have been huge. Now, by the time they get around to launching something, the market will be saturated.

Is it any wonder this company in sliding back into irrelevance again?


i dont ever remember Nintendo being irrelevant.
 

theWB27

Member
I love how everyone can armchair WBC this one with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.

Also I hate interviews like this because they don't tell you who at Nintendo they were working with. Was it an actual decision maker? What was Activision asking from Nintendo.

Yeah it is easy to look back and say man what a missed opportunity but we are not privy to but a smidge of the details. It does suck for Nintendo, and you have to wonder if the person making the decision had all the info and foresight, but this happens all the time.

The Exec who passed on the Beatles and said they wouldn't make it in the US was damn near right and still had a massively successful career.


And like others have said the real issue is that Nintendo has moved slowly and poorly to get in on the NFC gaming trend. Seriously a legit Pokemon game would crush with collectible toys. As would almost any kind of Nintendo IP crossover game.

I love how people ignore Nintendo's robust past of shunning any third party/joint ventures because of "risk."
 

Justified

Member
Yea that explains why the only consoles SE released a MMO on are Wii and Wii U. Makes perfect sense.

You're crazy if you don't think they forked over a ton of cash for Dragon Quest.

I wouldnt doubt it, Nintendo has so sort of "thing" for Enix (though they are merged now), Square convincing them to come with them to a competitor is one of the main reason for the Nintendo-Square feud
 

marrec

Banned
I don't think anyone could have predicted skylanders would take off, to "fully" play the game you need most of the characters right, like some areas are locked off or need to have a specific character to enter, that idea seemed like RL DLC imo so i can see why Nintendo backed off.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=25893255&postcount=117

A few people in the original announcement thread correctly surmised that this would be big. It wasn't hard to see if you understood the 6-12 year old market for toys. They were already buying $20 actions figures that don't do anything. Why not sell $20 actions figures that you can insert into your video game?
 
Top Bottom