by Doc – Owner, Founder, Would Be Happy If Smash Ultimate Just Got Ported To Every New Nintendo Console With Some Minor Updates Along The Way
The Pyra and Mythra amiibo 2-pack releases tomorrow morning, and amiibo retailers are suggesting that Sora is soon to follow. We’re almost 5 years out from the release of Smash Ultimate, and its DLC cycle lasted ~3 years, far longer than the typical 2 years that Nintendo typically aims for with its AAA-class games. No doubt the pandemic lengthened its DLC cycle by delaying character production and amiibo manufacturing, but now that we’re at the end of that delay… what happens now?
The Short Run
It’s not clear to me where amiibo goes from here. Obviously Sora’s going to come, and that’ll be the end of the high-selling Smash Bros series amiibo unless another game comes out. There goes our lifeline for guaranteed new amiibo releases.
Nintendo’s Switch-era strategy with amiibo releases seems to be to use them to further cash in on first-party games that they believe will sell a certain number of units – if Nintendo is sure that XYZ game will pull XYZ sales, they’ll usually put out an amiibo (or reprint amiibo) alongside it. That’s why weird, obscure amiibo like Chibi-Robo and Qbby never got amiibo reprints, but mainstream series like Animal Crossing got ever-larger lines of amiibo and reprints. In my opinion, it’s a strategy that works.
But our list of upcoming or recently-released amiibo is looking pretty small right now. We have Tears of the Kingdom Ganondorf and Zelda and Link, Pyra and Mythra, Noah and Mio from Xenoblade and… that’s all. There’s not much for amiibo in the pipeline that has been confirmed.
In fact, there’s not much in the Nintendo pipeline that has a solid release date. Nintendo’s Direct the other day sure brought a lot of good games to our ears for the near future, but none of those games have a release date beyond “2023”, let alone an amiibo announcement. One would imagine that Pikmin 4 would warrant new Pikmin amiibo, but no new amiibo have materialized despite its release date tomorrow.
We can probably assume that Super Mario Wonder will have some sort of new amiibo, as Nintendo was perfectly happy to produce Super Mario Odyssey amiibo for the last game in its money maker of a series, but I’m otherwise not seeing anything on the list of upcoming Nintendo games that seems like it’ll warrant new amiibo. We may get lucky and get some reprints of specific amiibo for series like Metal Gear Solid, or Super Mario RPG, or possibly Detective Pikachu, but that seems to be the extent of what we can hope for.
So in the short run, unless more announcements are soon to follow, it’s not looking good for amiibo.
The Long Run
I’ve speculated, speculated and speculated again about when Nintendo will cease its amiibo line. I hope they don’t, and keep amiibo going in some form for decades so I can pass this to my kids.
In the long run, Nintendo doesn’t have that same concern. Nintendo’s primary concern is to earn profit, and more power to them – the more profit Nintendo earns, the more likely it is we can get fan favorite games like Super Mario RPG on the Switch. I’ll never hold Nintendo’s goal of profit-seeking against them so long as it doesn’t come at the cost of the consumer’s enjoyment of the product.
But is amiibo even profitable anymore? Nintendo’s clearly cut out most of the amiibo fat- unlike the Wii U era, where random games would get amiibo for seemingly no reason, Nintendo is actually making amiibo for specific purposes as I described above. I have a hunch that Nintendo realized their strategy wasn’t working, so to cut costs and increase the likelihood of profitability on amiibo they cut down the number of products.
I think that as long as Nintendo is making enough money from amiibo to justify the increased cost of the NFC reader in the modern console’s hardware, and its developers don’t mind including some extra content for them, they’ll keep amiibo around.
Amiibo Doctor 