There is a question which has haunted me for many years pertaining to the popularity and decline of Skylanders... What happened? And why was its inevitable fall so utterly abrupt?

• Within 15 months of the launch of Skylanders Spyro's Adventure (the first entry in the franchise), Skylanders had generated an unprecedented $1bil in revenue. This figure would balloon up to $3bil less than two years later. It had been reported by Activision that revenue from Skylanders had been outpacing the likes of even Call of Duty, yet less than two years later, Skylanders Imaginators would debut with a measly 66k physical copies sold during it's launch *month* in the US.
• By February 2013, over 100 million Skylanders figures had been sold. A little over two years later (June 2015), it was reported that an additional 150 million figures would be sold. Between June 2015 and April 2017, however, only 50 million figrues would be sold. This is an >65% drop in figurine sales within two years.
• The reveal trailer for Skylanders Trap Team would rake in over 20 million views in Spring 2014. One year later, this figure drops down to 5 million for the reveal of Skylanders Superchargers, followed up by Skylanders Imaginators in June 2016 with 1 million. That's a 95% drop in viewership.

My theory is that Skylanders had filled a void left by Nintendo from late-2011 to mid-2014. Once games like Smash U, Splatoon, and Super Mario Maker started hitting the market, Skylanders would quickly fade into the background. By Summer 2016, Activision saw the writing on the wall, as Skylanders Imaginators had not recieved much marketing (especially appearent from the lack of any prerendered trailers and short films which had been present with all prior entries), lack of any new or original music in the main game, the substaintial decrease in the number of characters being sold, an immediate shift toward Crash Bandicoot with VV in 2017 and Spyro with TfB in 2018, decrease in playable levels from 20+ to only 10, etc. What do you think?

That's a good question. I think that "childish games" is specific genre. These games have a certain audience of players. TBH I don't know much about Skylanders and Disney Infinity. But overall such games had some stagnation and as a cosequence they saw some decline in terms of players. There was a moment between 2007 and 2011 when there were a big number of titles based on movies. Probably Wii played a role in the expansion of these games. However, a lot of such games were mediocre at best. Batman: Arkham was a rare exception bit it initially was targeted on "hardcore" group of gamers. As a result, starting from 2012 there were less and less movie games because many of them didn't sell much. Then some studios decided not to care about this "childish" genre. For example, Microsoft cancelled the support of Project Spark (it feels like it could be Dreams but from MS) and there isn't Recore 2, and in 2020 Sony partially closed Japan Studio which developed Knack 1-2 and Gravity Rush 1-2.

If we talk about Activision then it feels like that they focused on COD and some Blizzard games in the middle of 2010s. That's why they didn't make Prototype 3, stopped a relation with Bungie and decreased support of Skylanders. They chose to focus on most profitable games like COD, Hearthstone and mobile products. Now in MS era Activision lost Studio behind Crash Bandicoot (it' s independent now) and it's just hard to say what will be with some other studios. MS reorganise some teams now. It won't be shocking if some of Xbox Studios are gonna become COD support teams like Raven. I won't be surprised if tomorrow MS will announce that 343 will help with COD games. That's why I don't expect the return of Skylanders.

Not sure, it was all everywhere and then it was not. Amiibo, Skylanders, Lego, etc. The market was flooded for sure.

My wife has been getting the figures at garage sales, my youngest still enjoys the game now and then.

A couple times this summer I put an old TV out on the deck, ps3 with Skylanders, comfy couch and let him play with his friend. Box full of figures, they have tons of fun. Dunno why it disappeared so suddenly, but now you can get tons of those figures for $5.

We also have Disney Infinity yet that's all fallen/taken apart, figures mixed in with the rest of the lego. Much harder to set back up again and when you find them at garage sales they're in the same messy state.

Anyway buying new felt like a rip off. Probably the fact that you can buy whole digital games for less than the price of one figure / Disney Infinity build kit did it in. Plus Fortnite happened.

I think what ultimately killed Skylander's is a multifaceted answer, but I there there are 3 primary market pressure that did it.

1) The Nintendo Wii eventual death I think hurt the series tremendously as that was a huge casual audience machine that played this series. Some of those audiences did move onto other systems, but a large part went to mobile. Which mobile gaming in its self probably also lead to the downfall for the series.
2) Over-saturation of the toys to life market. If I remember right, there was a Lego, Disney, Skylanders, and Nintendo toys to life series going on. These toys started stacking up and I think that hurt Skylanders. Not just more competition, but more competition also made the market less interested in the toys to life concept as each did its yearly release.
3) Activision also over produce multiple of the toys resulting in massive losses on those through clearances. Also shelf space was expensive to buy and this series needed a large retail shelf presence due to all the toy variety.

So basically, it lost its audience due to the Wii dying/mobile and its audience getting to much toys to life. Then market realities made it inevitable.

The big difference between Nintendo's amiibo and other toys-to-life games is that those other series were basically 1-to-1 matches with specific releases. Every year, Activision would release one new Skylander game along with new figures. If one title did badly, that was it.

In contrast, Nintendo supported the heck out of amiibo. In 2015 alone, which was not a good year for Nintendo, there was at least some read-only support for amiibo in a dozen or so games, even though only a couple were amiibo-centric (Mario Party 10 and Amiibo Festival). Nintendo released twice as many amiibo-supporting games in 2015 as Activision released Skylander titles ever.

Also note that amiibo are all reasonably affordable figures of characters people already want merchandise of, something not necessarily the case with Skylanders. And there is also forwards compatibility; the upcoming Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is compatible with amiibo released as far back as 2014's Smash for Wii U set. 

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IMO, if a company wanted to get started in the toys-to-life business, they would need to release a fairly steady number of games per year, have rights to characters that would sell merchandise anyway, and would need a good enough reputation regarding not giving up shortly on projects. IMO, none of the big Western publishers meet that criteria; they often rely on games that don't have marketable characters, have poor reputations among the faithful collectors that sell half of these things, or simply don't release that many new products per year.

Disney could have done this with their Disney Infinity line, provided they chose to continue developing and publishing games that could support their figures. But Disney was already looking for the Exit to the games industry  when they jumped on board, so of course it didn't last.

Nothing? It was popular and then it wasn't. That's what happens to most entertainment products. It doesn't help that Activision overdid it like they did with Guitar Hero, but to be fair, if they didn't, others would have jumped in.

Very few things are just successful forever. It was a fad that ran its course.

Burned the candle at both ends.

Coronation Street is one of those few things… and there isn’t even a video game of that!

It got a spinoff. They called it Fortune Street but changed all the bad British acting into Dragon Quest characters.