However, this analysis privileges a sense of gaming value predicated on structured gameplay experiences, and Disney Infinity is also built around an open-ended world of creativity. Its Toy Box mode may be derivative of other titles, but it gives gamers the keys to the Magic Kingdom and allows them to explore their own Disney-branded worlds using the range of characters available for the game. While the play sets offer rigid franchise experiences where only figures from that particular franchise are able to participate, the Toy Box mode offers the absolute freedom to create your own Disney mash-ups.

It represents an expansion of the Disney license, away from purely promoting a single franchise toward reframing sandbox game creation within the context of the Disney universe (the title of a smaller “mash-up” title released in 2011). Many of the “toys” available to gamers are characters or locations from films like Aladdin or Disney-owned properties like The Muppets, and playing each play set unlocks items from those games that can then be repurposed and mashed up in the creation of new user-generated levels. The Toy Box system is robust: while some levels can be basic sandboxes for exploration, a series of “Creativi-Toys” give gamers the chance to build intelligent levels with internal logic and goals. It is here where Disney shifts their attention away from promotional value and toward building a platform that can continue to offer gamers value as long as new levels are being created and then shared with the community (either by users or by Disney themselves).

Although this potential value is a substantial part of Disney Infinity’s promise to gamers, it is built on value propositions uncommon within console gaming. The Toy Box mode comes with only a limited range of items, with users having to unlock other items through either collecting capsules scattered throughout each of the game’s five play sets or using “Infinity Spins”—earned by leveling up characters and completing Toy Box activities—to unlock items in the “Infinity Vault.” These items, which are picked at random when Infinity Spins are used, include the fundamental building blocks of more substantial levels, like race track pieces and side-scrolling cameras. If you want to build more complicated levels, you need to play the game long enough to earn the spins necessary to ensure you can collect these items at random.

It is here where Disney Infinity, despite being a console-based product and despite costing at least $74.99, evokes the free-to-play logics of social and mobile gaming. Its Toy Box mode is trapped behind a “playwall,” in which the full potential of the mode—if not its basic functionality—requires gamers to invest considerable time and energy in the rest of the game. While this does not necessarily require additional financial investment beyond the Starter Pack, it does encourage it: the fastest way to earn Infinity Spins is to buy additional characters to level up, as well as additional play sets to expand the Toy Box offerings available. The play sets themselves encourage this with an in-game Infinity Vault, which is only unlocked once you’ve collected every character tied to that play set and contains key Toy Box building blocks.

Disney’s “Sidekicks” figure pack—that they classify Mrs. Incredible as a “sidekick” is worth a larger discussion at a later date.

Although the game is playable out of the box, additional financial investment is ultimately required to access the full Disney Infinity experience. The choice to limit the play sets to characters from that franchise means that gamers who want to play co-operatively within each of the play sets must invest in at least three additional figures, which Disney has facilitated through discounted—but still $30—three-packs featuring characters from the three Starter Pack play sets. The ability to access multiplayer is the most substantial value tied to the purchase of additional figures. All characters are more or less evenly balanced, with no substantial gameplay differences when switching from character to character; beyond the value of collecting and playing as a favorite character, their value is instead tied to unlocking content the game has purposefully blocked off in order to incentivize further investment in the platform. The game’s Hall of Heroes tracks your progress in the game, but it also reminds you of all of the figures and power discs you haven’t collected yet.

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Like free-to-play titles, Disney Infinity is always quick to remind you of what you’re missing without making further investment. Character-specific vaults are scattered throughout each play set, locked until you purchase the character in question, and the game’s introduction makes sure to introduce you to various upcoming figures—and play sets—that won’t even be available to purchase until later this fall. However, unlike free-to-play titles, Disney Infinity isn’t actually free-to-play: although their PC and iPad apps allows you to build and share Toy Box creations for free, actually playing the game requires a $75 investment. It’s a high price, which raises the question of why the designers chose to place key Toy Box content behind its “playwall”: while the game has built-in incentives to encourage further purchases, getting gamers to commit to the platform based on potential value locked at launch is more challenging.

Disney Infinity represents a clear shift in Disney’s approach to licensing their valuable intellectual property, but it comes with as many limitations as possibilities. While Disney is promising an epic scale, and has still yet to fully tap into the incredibly valuable “golden age” animated properties of the 1990s, their efforts with Disney Infinity prioritize the business of licensed gaming without necessarily being able to offer gamers the scale they’ve promised without substantial investment.

The Lone Ranger play set, one of the two sold separately from the Starter Pack, functions more or less like any other licensed game tied to a film’s release. The play set was supposed to introduce the film’s world and its characters to audiences ahead of the film’s release, but instead—because of the delay, which was allegedly to appease retailers who wanted a release closer to the holiday season—arrives as a monument to a box office failure. While the play set was in development too long in advance to scrap entirely, the Lone Ranger and Tonto are absent from some of the promotional images surrounding the game’s release, and it is the only play set for which only two figures were produced (with fellow standalone play set, Cars, earning two extra figures beyond those included with the play set).

While not absent from all promotions for the film, this common piece of promotional material—found, among other places, on the official Infinity website—omits The Lone Ranger and Tonto.

Like any case of licensed content tied to a failed franchise, the Lone Ranger play set has a degree of novelty attached to it—after seeing I had purchased the play set, a colleague commented that it would either be worth a lot or nothing at all in thirty years. However, if the film had been successful, the play set would have offered a valuable case study for the future of Disney Infinity as a promotional platform. Would filmgoers have bought into the Infinity platform solely to access licensed content tied to a box office success, spending—at MSRP—$110 for the privilege? Would Disney Infinity gamers hungry for more content have picked up the play set and—provided the game was released during its planned June window—potentially gained greater interest in the film?

These questions are integral to the future productivity of Disney Infinity to Disney. Moving their licensed content onto the Infinity platform to help build interest in its release is certainly one of Disney’s goals, although one that is more likely to work with pre-existing franchises like Cars than with something entirely new. Disney’s selection of play sets to include with the Starter Pack—The Incredibles, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Monsters University—demonstrate a preference for franchises that appeal to both adults and kids, heavily relying on Pixar’s track record and largely obscuring Disney Animation Studios’ own animated output (although Wreck-it-Ralph figures are coming, and myriad Disney projects are represented in items available in the game’s Toy Box mode). These Starter Pack franchises are being used as gateways, which can then build an install base large enough that when Disney releases Frozen in November it will have figures available on store shelves ready to meet the demands of kids who’ve seen the movie.

However, Disney’s plans for Frozen in Infinity capture the difficulty of developing a new franchise through a still nascent platform. Although figures for Anna and Elsa are going to be made available, along with “power discs” offering special tools for the game’s Toy Box mode, there will be no open-world play set tied to the film. Instead, Disney will once again rely on an existing franchise to add value to the platform ahead of the Christmas holidays, with a “Toy Story in Space” play set launching in October alongside a collection of new stand-alone figures. And since players can only use figures from a particular franchise in a play set, the Anna and Elsa figures will only work in the sandbox Toy Box mode, with only a single character-specific mission built for each of the two characters as opposed to an entire “game.”

Although this may simply be a reality of the timing of Frozen’s release relative to the platform’s development, it signals that thinking about Disney Infinity as a replacement for licensed tie-ins—as opposed to the creative revolution they claim—may still be overestimating Disney’s plans. Rather, it may instead offer a way for them to avoid developing a traditional console and/or handheld title for particular films but nonetheless give those films a presence in the space of console and handheld video games. The company may otherwise be content to serve fans in the space of browser and mobile gaming, where development is cheaper and where Disney is having success with developing new franchises like Where’s My Water alongside derivative mobile titles.

This plan would likely serve Disney’s financial and promotional goals for Frozen, but it also means the value the franchise is adding to Infinity is limited. Although the two Frozen figures will—as pictured—be sold bundled with the two power discs (which are in other instances purchased in packages of two for $4.99) to commemorate the film’s opening, that package offers minimal new “content,” primarily offering aesthetic changes in Toy Box mode. With no future play sets planned beyond Toy Story, the Infinity platform functions not just as a new way to released licensed content but also a way for Disney to scale back its licensed game development while nonetheless ensuring presence—if not substantial presence—on consoles in the future. The question becomes whether they’re offering enough value in these standalone licensed products for them to serve as a promotional platform for either Infinity or the films in question, a question I will explore further in the final post of this series, “Behind the P(l)aywall“. See also the first post, “A Low-Risk Revolution.”

Kessler is not the only one to position Disney Infinity as a bold shift for Disney in the gaming field (see also: USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, The Wall Street Journal), but her article—unlike some of the others—downplays the derivative nature of Disney Infinity both as a game and as a gaming platform (focusing instead on the company’s broader approach to digital media, which I will explore in a subsequent post). Disney Infinity represents an intersection of risk and risk-aversion, a game designed to revolutionize—or at least claim to revolutionize—how Disney licenses their franchises within the gaming industry while simultaneously emulating pre-existing business models from within that industry.

When considering Disney Infinity as a business model, there is no question that Disney is looking closely at one of its competitors. Activision’s Skylanders series, which will release its third iteration Swapforce this fall, became a surprise success upon its debut in 2011. The series’ USB interface allowed gamers to transform collectible figurines—running roughly between $8 and $13—into in-game characters before their eyes, encouraging consumptive collecting as kids sought to gain access to all available characters. The Skylanders series has generated more than $1.5 billion in retail sales since its launch, a huge success for Activision and a definite inspiration for other companies wanting to cash in.

Disney Infinity is unable to hide its debt to Skylanders’ success. A $75 starter pack offers a collection of three figures—Jack Sparrow, Sulley, and Mr. Incredible—and a USB “Infinity Pad,” designed to activate the 17 figures from beloved Disney franchises available at launch (you can find the full lineup of content here). Infinity continues the convergence between the action figure aisle and the video game aisle, helped by prominent placement at retailers like Toys R Us (who embraced Skylanders, and who have partnered with Disney for an exclusive figure and other store-exclusive Infinity content). With additional figures and playsets—which add additional content—arriving beginning in October, Disney has positioned itself to take advantage of the holiday rush while simultaneously capturing early adopters looking to fill their virtual—and physical—toy boxes.

Although ambitious in scale, that Infinity is so clearly copying—if also altering, as I’ll explore in subsequent posts—Activision’s business model seems at odds with Disney’s corporate focus on creativity. While the game’s appeal is built around a “Toy Box” mode that expands on Skylanders‘ success and offers gamers the chance to bring different Disney franchises together and create their own levels in the Disney tradition of imagination (highlighted in the above trailer), even that mode is very purposefully modeled on recent success stories like Mojang’s Minecraft and Media Molecule’s Little Big Planet series.

While Disney Interactive’s Avalanche Software—who previously developed the licensed tie-in based on Toy Story 3—has created a game built on the rhetoric of imagination and creativity, Disney Infinity is also a game that has carefully calculated its structure based on the market—and critical—success of other companies. Although it is true that any gaming investment on this scale is a risk, in this case it’s a risk that has been mitigated by Disney’s conscious effort to copy their competitors in this field.

It’s also a risk that despite its initial scale is designed to simplify the process of Disney continuing to leverage its film and television content in the way it has for years. Although an ambitious undertaking in terms of initial financial investment, an established platform like Infinity provides Disney with a game engine, an install base of consumers, and a development familiarity that will allow them to efficiently deliver content tied to new feature films or television projects without the challenges of working with a range of development studios on separate licensed titles. Disney shut down multiple in-house studios and various in-progress licensed titles to funnel development toward Infinity, betting on its long-term potential not to revolutionize the quality of licensed video games but to make it more efficient to develop the kind of “lunch box” paratexts that Kessler prematurely signals are no longer part of Disney’s strategy.

Disney Infinity is at its core a fancier, more expensive, and multi-compartmentalized lunch box, one that in its engagement with so many Disney franchises appeals to both nostalgic parents and avid young Disney fans alike. It’s an impressive monument to the Disney legacy, but at the same time it’s a monument to a legacy of “Imagineering” that shows substantive creativity in neither its short term risk-aversion nor its long-term goal of franchising efficiency. Although the game offers a platform in its “Toy Box” mode to build your own worlds and engage in gamers’ creativity through downloading user-generated levels from a central server, at launch it’s difficult to see Disney as innovating in the space of video games so much as they are slightly recalibrating the way they use video games in response to prevailing market trends.

In part two (“A Promotional Platform“) and part three (“Behind the P(l)aywall“), I will further explore how Disney intends to handle the development of promotional paratexts within the Infinity platform, as well as how the company is defining gaming “value” within the platform both at launch and in the release of additional content in the months and years ahead.