tl;dr
Not sure why Nintendo is surprised amiibo are being collected or bought by fans since they marketed it as such (and it sure made them a lot of money). The only issue that its multi-game compatibility became a mess.
How would you have done amiibo?
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Been meaning to make this thread since Nintendo admited that amiibo are being collected instead of used two months ago. I think it mainly boils down to Super Smash Bros. 4, the game that launched amiibo.
After turning down Skylanders to then become a financial success, Nintendo had to add NFC to its next device. Guess Nintendo was initially thinking where to release these NFC tags, if as figures or cards. Surely while waiting and playing with Pokemon Rumble U; the obvious fit with Smash came up, the game already had Nintendo figurines... loads and loads. And here is the issue with amiibo and why it became a collectable.
In 2014 when amiibo was announced, Nintendo had to justify and differentiate itself from the competition. The main feature for this was multi-game compatibility, but also the quality of the toys. They surely didn't think it through, since in the end it has resulted in complicated compatibility usage that requires website or fan-based lists being made (I've even seen charts and tables in shops...).
Let's return to Smash, a game with so many characters, that means a lot of figurines will need to be made ($_$). But how do you make each an everyone of those compatible with other software?
Have to say that Smash is one of the few games that uses amiibo in a reasonable way, you just pick the character you like and battle with him. But after that the multi-game usage was seen as meaningless unlocks of skins and weapons from the NFC read capabilities and the meaningful NFC write features was only being used in Smash. Due to these read features, quite a few expected cheap NFC cards to come out; still demand increased for relevant multi-game usage, even a Skylanders adventure type of game.
The release of Mario Party 10 and the Mario series amiibo started to fragment the amiibo multi-game compatibility since it brought relevant write features into the game. You could only save one game features into an amiibo, meaning you had to delete your Mario Smash data to use in Mario Party 10 or just buy a new Mario amiibo from the Mario series.
From then on amiibo became compatible with read features or new amiibo series got released to lock content behind. Captain Toad is one, to then have one of the worst offenders, with Splatoon figurines only released to lock mini-games and single player challenges. New usage of amiibo was surfacing behind new amiibo, the multi-game usage feature started to become moot. Amiibo would only add features to the fans of the series who'd buy another figurine.
New forms like the Yoshi plush and Mario memorabilia tried to add special content to its title while keeping the multi-game compatibility in other games as simply Yoshi or Mario amiibo. Then the cards were released to support new titles... to end with the amiibo game everyone was waiting for.
Detailing what has happened has developed in quite a wall of text, sorry for that... Still we are left wondering where is amiibo going next? Nintendo isn't stopping and they are just letting the amiibo flow while collectors and fans continue to buy. In the future we have these new amiibo to look forward such as Wolf Link and Star Fox; maybe Pokken and... even more Splatoon.
