Production on Disney Infinity has ground to a halt now that the House of Mouse has confirmed plans to discontinue the toys-to-life series, costing the company upwards of $147 million.
Word comes by way of Disney’s official site, relayed by Ben Fritz of the Wall Street Journal, revealing that much of that financial cost stems from inventory write-down and employee severance.
Indeed Disney Infinity‘s declining performance in recent months did confirm sluggish sales, though this is the first clear indication that the studio is all but done with the Infinity series. Jimmy Pitaro, Disney Consumer Products and Interactive Media Chairman, posted the following statement confirming the closure of Avalanche Software.
“After a thorough evaluation, we have modified our approach to console gaming and will transition exclusively to a licensing model. This shift in strategy means we will cease production of Disney Infinity, where the lack of growth in the toys-to-life market, coupled with high development costs, has created a challenging business model. This means that we will be shutting down Avalanche, our internal studio that developed the game. This was a difficult decision that we did not take lightly given the quality of Disney Infinity and its many passionate fans.”
Bouncing off that, CEO Bob Iger pointed to the competitive toys-to-life genre as a key reason behind the company’s decision.
“We thought we had a really good opportunity to launch our own product in that space. I realize it was console space, but it was also essentially– a large component of it was the toys-to-life, they call it toys-to-life business. In fact we did quite well with the first iteration of it, and we did okay with the second iteration. But that business is a changing business and we did not have enough confidence in the business in terms of it being stable enough to stay in it from a self-publishing perspective.”
Our best goes out to those affected by today’s closure.
[Sources: Disney Interactive, Game Informer, Twitter]
