Star Wars characters are the epic finale for Disney Infinity 3.0

Above: Star Wars characters for Disney Infinity 3.0.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: There’s a lot of competition. Is the five-dollar price point a nod toward the fact that there’s a lot of toys-to-life options now?

Blackburn: What we’re doing with the price cut, it’s more about player choice from our perspective. What we hear from our players is that they care a great deal about multiplayer out of the box. We reduced it primarily to give people a choice of what their next avatar can be. By putting three in there, we were going back to what we did on Infinity one where we had three play sets. On Infinity two we wanted multiplayer out of the box. But this way, we just want you to have the choice of what characters you want. That’s something we heard from people. And obviously, price sensitivity — we want as many people to be able to experience this as we can. We’re trying to get as close as we can to the price of a normal video game.

GamesBeat: These are also full games, but are you able to do them more efficiently and more quickly now that you’re on the third time around?

Blackburn: We’re able to incorporate more properties for people. That’s how I look at it. Whenever we come out, we’re trying to make sure that you, as whatever type of Disney fan — be that Star Wars or Marvel or Disney — have the choice of what you want to do. It’s about giving you a variety of about five different characters. Each of these characters takes a lot of work to put in. We have all the skill trees and different moves they have, trying to make sure that those are all correct. That’s where a lot of effort goes into this. The variety of play sets is also an important component of those decisions.

If you’re just talking about efficiency, I think what it’s coming down to is, we keep adding new features, and so we don’t get any more efficient. We just add more stuff.

GamesBeat: That explains eight studios, too.

Blackburn: In all honesty, there is, just from a business perspective — the down side of this is that we have to go make sure that all the other characters we’ve introduced still work. There’s a lot of work in going back through. We showed the feature where everyone can use all the melee weapons. We went through and enhanced every one of the old characters. When you do that across 100-plus characters, that’s a lot of work.

From my standpoint, it’s important that — if I’m a kid and Buzz Lightyear is my favorite character, I want him to be as cool as possible. We want to go back and add that value, so that the kid who bought that two years ago still feels good about the purchase. Hey, today he’s still my favorite character to play because he has all these cool new moves.

Above: Star Wars: Twilight of the Republic for Disney Infinity 3.0.

Image Credit: Disney

GamesBeat: What did he mean when he was talking about 3.0? It sounded like he was talking about a final part of this whole project.

Blackburn: When we started, we knew we were bringing in Disney and Pixar and live action films from Disney. We knew that the second one was going to be Marvel. Right about that time was when Lucas was then acquired by Disney. We planned out our road map and said, you know what? By the time we get Star Wars in her, that would be the launch. So we’re finishing the launch of Infinity.

We feel like we’re now all things Disney. We promised that we would be all things Disney, and now we really are. That’s what John means. Now you’ll see us, in the future, supporting all the films. We’ll probably never have another thing like this, unless some other big acquisition goes down, but now all the main product families are here.

GamesBeat: Well, they need to buy somebody else big, then. You need some new movies to work on.

Blackburn: There’s a few things coming. I can’t say much about films, but the summer of 2017 is going to be a killer.

GamesBeat: You must be getting ready now.

Blackburn: Well, we’ve been looking at it.

Above: Star Wars: Twilight of the Republic for Disney Infinity 3.0.

Image Credit: Disney