Activision is announcing the Skylanders: Trap Team video game as the latest installment of a series that has generated more than $2 billion in revenue through a clever melding of toys and video games. The newest version has innovations that change the motto of “bringing toys to life” by reversing it and “bringing life to toys.”
Skylanders trap shield
The big video game publisher has a lot at stake in Skylanders: Trap Team, as the series has sold more than 176 million toys in the past few years, even in the face of some serious competition from Disney Infinity, another toy-game hybrid. Rather than waging brand warfare as Disney has done, Activision hopes to capture the imagination of gamers — and trap even more dollars in the consumer’s wallet — through gameplay innovation.
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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.
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