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Amiibo

Nintendo has teamed up with Loot Crate for a limited-time amiibo distribution. Those who sign up for an “amiibo Subscription Service” will receive 10 pre-selected amiibo separated into three special Loot Crate shipments throughout the holiday season.

Mario, Pikachu, Donkey Kong, Fox and Yoshi are included in the shipments. The other five figures will be revealed through Loot Crate soon.

Scott Moffitt, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of Sales & Marketing, said of today’s news:

If you’re interested in amiibo and are considering picking up a figure or two, you may want to put in a pre-order – or make a purchase at launch. Nintendo is counting on the first amiibo shipments to sell out pretty fast.

“We’re expecting this first wave to disappear really quickly,” Nintendo’s Gil Ruta told The Detroit News. “We’re encouraging people to pre-order theirs or be the first in line.”

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Everything we’ve seen thus far of amiibo has been limited to first-party content. However, Nintendo is now looking into ways its third-party partners can integrate figures into their games.

Nintendo of America licensing manager Damon Baker told IGN:

“We’re having those conversations and we’re still early on because amiibo isn’t even going to launch until later this month. We’re excited to see how that pans out but there’s a ton of interest from our third-party partners and we’re looking at what makes sense in terms of business models and levels of integration. There are really creative ideas that are coming through and we are working towards some opportunities for next year.”

Marketing director David Wharton also said:

“Think about our implementation for our products, it’s really developer-centric. It’s really about opening up new capabilities and new ways of extending the value of games and bringing the functionality into games. As a company we’re interested in as many different creative explorations of that functionality. Exactly what that’s going to be in the future, not only for third-party but first-party, that story has yet to be written. We’ve got a couple of examples of how it’s going to look today — but imagine the future, the sky is the limit.”

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When the Wii U launched, there was a consistent focus on the console’s two screens. Gamers wondered about the new experiences that would be possible and potential asymmetric gameplay.

Even though it’s important to highlight the uniqueness of Wii U’s two screens, Shigeru Miyamoto admitted at Nintendo’s financial results briefing last week, “we might have focused too much on the unique uses of the two screens.” Miyamoto feels that the company “should have put more effort into using the NFC functionality much earlier”, though Nintendo is “now moving forward with projects that make use of NFC in a variety of unique ways.”

As previously mentioned, Nintendo is looking into amiibo cards. We’ll also be seeing “smaller and even more affordable amiibo figures in the future”.

Head past the break for Miyamoto’s full comments.

Nintendo was asked to comment on the capabilities of amiibo during the Q&A portion of its latest financial briefing.

President Satoru Iwata first addressed the topic and touched on how the Wii U’s NFC features have not been truly utilized until now. He also discussed the instantaneous speed of the read/write process for amiibo figures, and teased that Shigeru Miyamoto “has been considering multiple ways to use the GamePad, and using the NFC reader/writer function more aggressively is one area he has instructed his teams to focus on.” Nintendo could bring out some titles next year that focus on NFC functionality.

Head past the break for Iwata’s full comments.


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