Where did Skylanders Go?

 Skylanders as a Fad

The game of Skylanders introduced a new mechanic to the gaming industry: real world figurines compatible to in game characters. If you went to your local game stop or (at the time) Toys R Us, you could go inside and buy some Skylanders. When you went home you could put your Skylander on the portal and they would come to life on your tv, which was all the rage was at the time, figurines coming to life in game! Skylanders very quickly became collectables and that's how the Skylander's company was making their money, not from selling more copies upon copies, but instead selling a good number of copies, and everyone who bought copies bought tons of the Skylander figurines. There are two reasons I believe that Skylanders is a game that failed overall: it was a game without replay ability, and figurine concept unfortunately failed.

Considering Skylanders Giants, the version of Skylanders I played, the game is about a story of you as one of the many Skylanders trying to save the world from the evil villain, but the important part is that this is a story game. You are playing through this game one singular way to discover the end of the story, so once you play this game, you cannot play it again, there are not very many variables to the game. Because these games are not replay able, they were not the front of people's minds, so whenever the new Skylander games came out, people were not thinking all about the new Skylander's game.

The second part of why Skylander's failed is because nobody wanted to collect all the figurines like the developers of the game thought they would. There were only a select few people who would buy these Skylander's and usually it was parents buying the figurines for their kids. After accumulating your first five to six Skylanders, you can see how much space they start taking up in your home. Compared to games that hold all their data and gameplay strictly inside the game, it was inefficient to have Skylanders in the real world because you could lose them, you would have to pay for each and every Skylander, and people just did not want to keep paying to unlock the new experience. So eventually, people stopped playing this game because it simply required players to pay so much money for all the little figurines every time a new version of the game came out, which is why it was ultimately a fad, good in concept, but in actuality it fails over time. 

That being said, Skylanders was a good game, with incredible story and new concepts to video games people had never seen before and is one of the smaller video games people need to see so games like Zelda and Mario do not keep taking over the video game industry. I think if Skylanders introduced some small amount of replay ability into their game I think they would have gotten some extra players and maybe would have survived a little longer, but ultimately at some point, needed to go completely digital.