For a while, it seemed as though Activision had another hit on their hands with the Skylanders franchise. Back in 2013, it was revealed that the franchise was actually outselling other action figures, a pretty mean feat to accomplish. However fast forward to today and it tells a very different story.
According to Liam Robertson (via Nintendo Everything), he recently posted a video on YouTube in which he revealed that it is possible that Skylanders 2017 has been cancelled. Activision has been shipping a version of the game every year since its debut in 2011, but apparently 2017 is when they will be giving it a miss.
The future of the franchise is also being questioned as it seems that Activision’s other efforts, like viewership of Skylanders Academy on Netflix was not up to scratch, and sales of Skylanders merchandize is down. It also seems that apart from Skylanders 2017, Activision has no other Skylanders-related title in the works.
It is unclear if this means that the franchise has been cancelled (unlikely), but Activision has yet to respond to these claims. In any case it is not surprising if sometimes developers give their franchises some breathing room. For example this is the first year in a while that Ubisoft will not be debuting a new major Assassin’s Creed video game, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is in trouble.