Problem seems to be that they probably have too much hubris to just settle for building towards becoming a legitimate gaming publisher capable of leveraging their properties on their own. Instead of following in WB's footsteps in really breaking into the industry (which is weird to say, considering it's generally the other way around in other stuff) by making/publishing a lot of smaller/simpler stuff until they could get to the point where they had groomed a number of internal studios capable of producing well regarded adaptations of their properties, they rebooted/consolidated their gaming division and almost immediately threw a lot of money into working on a massively bloated toys to life project that tried to cram multiple genres down into a single game all to try and drink the milkshake of a much simpler (and probably significantly cheaper) product. And when it became clear that it wasn't the success they anticipated, they ran.
There's an interesting comparison in how Marvel similarly kept trying to break into the tabletop RPG market (even as recently as a few years ago), which made a lot of sense given tabletop gaming and comics generally overlap in their markets and frequently share the same space. Then,even when they'd find relative success in doing so, they'd always bail within a short time because it didn't meet their expectation of success of matching the industry leader (re: Dungeons & Dragons) in an industry where even the most popular/successful alternatives are still typically in a very very very distance second.
Yeah, that's another thing. Disney just wants to enter at the top end and win. For what it's worth, Activision started small and worked their way into what they are today. Their leader, Kotick, was a developer that used to work the trenches, and invested in Activision solely because he was a fan of their games at a time they were teetering on bankruptcy.
Nintendo was already a toy maker and a video game maker. Amiibo plays to both their strengths and institutional knowledge.