Starlink: Battle for Atlas
Starlink: Battle for Atlas
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Starlink: Battle for Atlas hands-on — Going in hot with Nintendo’s Starfox character on the Switch

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Ubisoft showed off its new entry in the “toys-to-life” market, Starlink: Battle for Atlas. I played it at a recent preview event on the Nintendo Switch and got hands-on with Starfox character Fox McCloud, which Nintendo agreed to allow Ubisoft to use as an add-on character in the game.

The presence of Fox McCloud shows that Ubisoft is making a big bet on this market. Activision and Toys for Bob created toys-to-life with Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure in 2011. By 2014, the toy-game hybrid had generated more than $2 billion in revenues from the sales of video games and more than 175 million action figures. But the market collapsed, taking down Activision, Disney, and Warner Bros. In 2017, even Activision put Skylanders on hiatus.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.