In retrospect, I may have gone a little overboard on the whole Skylanders thing. I have a very large collection of the figures at this point, though I did swear off them cold turkey after Superchargers came out. And Trap Team pretty much guaranteed I wasn't coming back. I had done the same with Disney Infinity 2.0, though I had picked up at least one starter for that. You may ask why I'm bringing this up, and it's mainly as a preface to the point at hand. Disney's games division has declared that they're getting out of producing their own games, which means Infinity (all three versions) will have their servers shut down on March 3rd. All of the user-generated content will no longer be available for download. Multiplayer games will be impossible. To turn a phrase, Disney is taking all of the players' toys and going home.
This should not be a surprise to anybody, really. Particularly in light of Disney's shutdown of LucasArts, the House of Mouse has made it abundantly clear that they don't want to be caught up in having to make game content themselves. Rather, they're going forward with a purely licensing model. Naturally, the games will have to follow Disney's guidelines. Wouldn't want programmers slipping in "Hot Coffee" sequences in Kingdom Hearts Umpteen.Whatever, would we? This strategy is probably the closest one could come to having your cake and eating it too. It is also just past asinine.
I've long been conflicted over the "toys-as-games" products that have come out so far because there's a deeply disingenuous strand of publisher sentiment about the whole thing. They're looking at the games as a service, but the toys as a product. They'll loudly proclaim that there's no division between the two components, that both are necessary to truly enjoy the "experience" they're peddling. They'll bugle with indecent glee all of the possible "user generated content" that can be created while quietly making it impossible for anybody to use that content for anything outside of playing in the publisher's very regimented little sandbox. While I haven't been what you'd call overly ambitious when it comes to the sort of "toyboxes" that are part of Infinity, the things I've seen other people make is pretty nifty. And in a little while, all of those creations, all of those deeply individual experiences, will be lost forever. And that bothers me a great deal.
Part of what makes it so troubling to me is that there was a tremendous investment made by Disney to try something new and interesting. They went and built a community that was probably on par with Minecraft, from casual builders to people who wanted to stretch how far the tools could go. They invested money and resources to create a game, and a toy line, and all of the support infrastructure for those components. And now, they're simply abandoning it, probably because they feel they can get bigger profits faster by licensing out games rather than by building their own. It strikes me as needlessly wasteful. They could have simply had another company make the next version of the game, kept the servers going, kept their production lines operating, and kept building up the community. And if it wasn't profitable from the get-go, then why the hell bother doing this now rather than kill it earlier?
From a gamer's perspective, it sucks for a couple reasons. Suddenly, every gamer who has ever bought Infinity figs and power discs is going to have a bunch of very useless knick-knacks. Sure, some people might be able to repurpose them, use them as paperweights or build elaborate dioramas around them. But most of us who have finished all the single player content will no longer have any use for them, and they can't really be sold off because anybody we sell them to won't have any use for them outside of art projects or going through single player content. And there's no guarantee they're going to want to go through single player content or make an art project out of them. They become junk, more wasted plastic and circuitry that will not rot in a landfill somewhere for the next thousand years or so. Least with LEGO Dimensions, you can add them into your existing LEGO projects.
Some of my readers might be yelling, "Grow up!" Some might wonder, with all of the incredibly fucked up things that are happening in the world right now, why I'm getting worked up over a stupid branded toy line. It's not the toy line itself that is the problem. It's the philosophy and the ethos behind the toy line, and the games associated with it. I have no doubt that some enterprising souls will probably try to make something out of all these soon to be useless toys. But the larger problems still remain. Instead of our kids growing out of these toys, or even finding new ways to play with them on their own, they simply stop working. Kids who worked long and hard coming up with their own unique creations are told "Tough shit" by some suit through a press release and can only watch as all of those efforts are destroyed. Even worse, the grown-ups who found ways to play with their kids that they never had growing up, or got into the routine of building toyboxes with their children and learning with them, are now stuck in the unenviable position of having to lose that special form of bonding, and probably having to try and explain corporate bullshit to a kid who just wanted to build a Monsters, Inc/Cars stunt mashup. It sends a terrible message to young and old alike: your entertainment is nothing without us, and we can take away just as easily as we give, without any consideration for you or your works.
I honestly don't think that the basic premise of these sorts of hybrid toys is wrong. From a technical perspective, it's incredibly clever. From a cultural perspective, it's intriguing. But we need to have a framework that lets these toys and these works operate outside of a corporate giant ponderously squashing things flat. If Disney wants to license somebody to make figures based off their films and TV shows, fine and well. But once that's done, and once the figures are bought, let the kids have their fun with them for as long as they can.
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