| Mr Khan said: I'm half-ashamed to say that i would buy them all (or at least the full smash set) even though i barely actually used the ones i got. They're pretty cool just to have around. Kirby sits on my desk even though i've barely trained him. |
It's cool for collectors. I have at least one friend who has bought a ton of them just because he wants the figures. Personally the quality isn't quite high enough for me to want to display them or anything, and they don't hold enough value for me because I don't plan to buy all of the games they're compatible with. So to me it just feels like Nintendo made some extra stuff for a couple of games I actually would buy and then locked it away piecemeal behind a bunch of $13 DLCs.
I wouldn't mind it so much if it was like... I could buy a single, great-looking amiibo for $20 (or even a bit more) that would unlock all of the content locked behind individual amiibo. There's no technical reason a Link amiibo can't hold the data for a Mario FP in Smash Bros. $13 is much more than the Mii costumes in Mario Kart are collectively worth, etc. Of course this would be a terrible business plan for Nintendo because it wouldn't incentivise fans to buy more than one amiibo, so they would hardly be selling any at all.
What's good for their business leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though. It reminds me of free to play games with a "premium subscription" setup, only none of these games are free to play so I definitely feel like the $60 I spent on them ought to have given me access to all of the content, and that "extra" content sold separately should be priced reasonably, not $13 for a single costume or a special computer opponent that can only take the form of one out of fifty playable characters.
Actually, Kirby is one of the ones that looks great. I doubt they could do much better even at a higher cost. But Link, by far the most "useful" amiibo so far, looks pretty lousy. It would certainly be possible for them to make better-looking figures without raising the costs, as the designs and stances chosen for the Smash set are just mostly inconvenient for conversion to figures. Hopefully the situation will improve now that it's clear they're popular... but then that begs the question of how many times Nintendo fans will be willing to buy the same characters.
