Although Disney Infinity did not arrive in stores until August last year, it has now been more than one year since the announcement of the massive gaming initiative. Looking back at Disney Infinity’s first year, it has been a massive success. It was recently announced that the starter set alone sold more than 3 million copies – take into account that the price of the game is approximately $75, and that translates into roughly $225 million, and again that is not counting the additional play sets, figures, and power discs. That makes Disney Infinity 2 less of a question and more of an inevitability. Could we be seeing it later this year?
Andy Robertson at Family Gamer TV reports that a temporary job listing, reportedly for a Disney Infinity follow-up, has shown up on the Disney Interactive site. Asking for a game tester to join Avalanche, the team that developed the original game, the job description notes that it “is estimated to last 4-5 months,” which would take us through late summer. The job of a game tester obviously exists only because some form of the game must exist as well. It is incredibly painstaking to run through every last thing in the game to ensure it is working properly and that bugs are squashed, but it is crucial to the game development process. Taking into account the length of the job, Robertson estimates that it would set the game for release late this year.
Answering a question that has been posed to the Disney Infinity team since its announcement, the Wall Street Journal also reports (full story only accessible to subscribers) that Star Wars and Marvel will be part of the equation in future game releases:
New versions of Infinity featuring characters from Disney’s Marvel superhero unit and the Star Wars universe it acquired along with Lucasfilm in 2012 are being developed…
When I have had the opportunity to speak with members of the Avalanche team, they could never confirm whether the two huge properties that Disney had acquired in recent years would be coming to the series, but did state that it would be a fun direction to go in. Sometimes it is hard to remember that a development team like Avalanche is made up of humans that, like us, are big fans of Star Wars and Marvel characters, so you can imagine how excited they would be to work on games mixing them together, along with the Disney properties from the first game.
The truth of the matter, though, is that this is all speculation until Disney confirms it. We do not have an official timeline on a sequel to the original smash hit, which, by the way, continues to fly off the shelves, but if the game is coming later this year, a major announcement should be incoming in the near future. If there is anything that the rampant speculation tells us, for sure, it is that gamers are hungry for more because they love what they have seen from Disney Infinity so far.