At Nintendo’s financial results briefing earlier today, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata revealed how Nintendo plan to use their character I.P. for a new kind of business activity—figurines that can interact with videogames.
These figurines, Iwata said, will come with built-in NFC (Near-Field Communication) functionality that will enable them to be detected by the Wii U console’s GamePad controller, and will have different effects within the games they pertain to. The figurines are being codenamed “NFP”—short for “NFC Featured Platform” and “Nintendo Figurine Platform”.
Consumers will be able to buy and collect these figurines, and then use them with a number of software titles that will be released in the future, Iwata said. Figurines are being designed to work with multiple games on Nintendo platforms, including Nintendo 3DS, which will use a special NFC Reader/Writer peripheral for this purpose.
What’s interesting is, these figurines can not only upload data to a game, but can also read and download data from a game. Iwata said that this means you will be able to “customize your NFP to raise or train your own Nintendo characters”.
More details on NFP figurines and the games they are compatible with will be revealed at E3 in June. In the meantime, Iwata outlined the goals of NFP as follows:
- To serve as the first example of actively utilizing Nintendo’s character I.P.
- Nintendo character figurines displayed on store shelved will provide exposure, raise brand awareness and provide an incentive for people to play videogames.
