Activision’s Skylanders franchise is to kids and families what Activision’s Call of Duty franchise is to teenager and adults: a second-to-none cash cow that keeps selling like hot cakes with no signs of franchise fatigue from potential players in sight.
Today Activision updated their impressive Skylanders sales numbers to bump the total worldwide retail sales figure from $1 billion to $1.5 billion as part of the company’s second quarter earnings release. They also claim that Skylanders Giants was the bestselling console and hand-held game “in overall dollars” for the first half of 2013. In other words, Activision came to this conclusion after figuring in the countless Skylanders figures sold into the equation, which really isn’t fair to the other games without companion physical toys on the list.
This fall will be a big one for Activision as the third console game in the franchise, Skylanders Swap Force, will be released. Two months prior, and only a couple weeks from now, Disney Interactive will release the first direct competition to Skylanders in the form of Disney Infinity. How the arrival of another “Toys to Life” participant impacts retailer shelf space and Skylanders sales will be interesting to watch play out through the remainder of this year. It’s hard enough for parents to keep up with paying $10 and up for each of the Skylanders figures, much less $13 and up for the Disney Infinity characters.
Call of Duty continues to sell like crazy even with direct competition from EA and Battlefield so the same should be expected when Disney Infinity takes on Skylanders. New Skylanders games on an annual basis should be expected for the foreseeable future.
Check out a pair of new Swap Force screenshots below that were released with today’s Activision earning’s report.
