Better to License

Disney killed Disney Infinity in 2016, the franchise that grew out of Toy Story 3's Toy Box mode, and decided it was better to license. On October 15 the Toy Story 3 game comes back, licensed to Atari.

On September 29 the Xbox 360 version of Toy Story 3 left the Xbox Store, $9.99 and gone. The same day, three older Toy Story games came off PlayStation’s store, two PS1 titles and the PSP version of Toy Story 3. The reason is October 15, when Toy Story 3: The Complete Edition arrives for $24.99, remastered by Digital Eclipse, published by Atari, with a Retro Roundup collection of the older games beside it. If you already bought the 2010 game on Xbox you can keep playing it. Disney just won’t sell you another copy.

The 2010 game had two halves. Story mode retraces the film. Toy Box mode drops you into an open Western town where Mayor Hamm, Slinky and the rest hand out errands, and the money you earn buys new buildings. Reviewers preferred the second half. The game went to number one on the UK full-price chart for three weeks.

The studio was Avalanche Software, which Disney had bought in 2005. In 2013 Avalanche took that Toy Box and built Disney Infinity on it, figurines on a plastic base that you set on a portal to bring them into the game. In May 2016 Disney shut the whole thing down. It booked a $147 million charge, about 300 people lost their jobs, most of them at Avalanche in Salt Lake City, and the studio closed. Disney’s stated reasons were that the toys-to-life market had stopped growing and that development cost too much. Bob Iger’s conclusion, as reported then, was that it was better to license the characters than to build games from scratch.

Warner Bros. reopened Avalanche in January 2017. Its biggest game since is Hogwarts Legacy.

So the game that started all that is coming back on the plan Disney chose ten years ago. A different company develops it and another one publishes it. The film it comes from is about toys that nearly get thrown away.