Over the past year and a half, collectibles brands have been entering the breakfast cereal market. The products are intended to taste good, but also to serve as a collectible in their own right. They are often sold through retail outlets that focus on collectibles and other non-food products, rather than in supermarkets. Three notable […]
Tag Archives | Nintendo
Out of Sight
Licensors continue to show interest in utilitarian product categories that at one time would not have been considered for licensing. One example: electronics and computer components such as memory cards and graphics processing units (GPUs), as well as batteries. These items have been attracting the attention of entertainment/character licensors of late: This month, Disney/Lucasfilm and […]
Tough Times for Toys-to-Life Titles
The shutdown of Lego Dimensions is the latest bad news for the “toys-to-life” segment of the toy and interactive gaming industries. The sector, which got its mainstream start with Activision’s Skylanders in 2011, represented one of the top trends in the toy business in its not-long-ago heyday. Warner Bros. Interactive, TT Games, and Lego announced […]
Cosplay Beyond the Cons
Cosplay—dressing up as a favorite anime, videogame, television, or book character, in a self-created and realistic costume, and interacting with others doing the same—has been a big and growing hobby for several years. More recently, the popular avocation has moved beyond the borders of the numerous comic book and pop culture conventions and into the […]
Entering the Escape Room Game
The popularity of location-based escape room games—where several friends are locked in a room for an hour and must solve clues and puzzles in order to free themselves—has been on a steep rise since 2012 in the U.S. and since at least 2010 abroad. (The first such game launched in Japan in 2007.) From 2010 […]