Nintendo started selling its My Mario collection of toys, apparel and experiences designed for young children and the parents and caregivers.
The toys are meant to inspire fun and imaginative play for young children. They included wooden block Amiibo toys based on Nintendo’s characters, Mario and Mushroom Boy plushies, as well as third-party Fisher-Price toys for kids 1.5 years and up.
Kids can explore and play side-by-side with Mario and his Mushroom Kingdom friends with thoughtfully designed products for story time, bedtime, and all the fun times in between.
I visited the Nintendo San Francisco store in Union Square, where they dedicated a lot of self space to the new products. There were a bunch of kids in the crowd of attendees and they took to the toys immediately.
The marketing strategy is clear and it’s backed up by recent research such as a report by the Magid Games Team in 2024, where surveys showed that smartphones had replaced Nintendo devices as the first place where kids encounter games.
That report found players are also starting out playing games at younger ages. About 29% of those under three years old are playing games. And by the time they’re seven, they’re playing games as much as older age groups.
It turns out that toys are a good place to start because kids engage with them before they start playing digital games or play online. And it’s probably true that if you don’t get your brand in front of kids, you’ll be on the losing side when those kids grow up and become dedicated consumers of products based on their favorite brands.
The Fisher-Price toys included a $50 large play set where kids could push buttons and make things happen.
I brought a Mario plushie home and my dog immediately started playing with it. For digital play, there was also a My Mario app that worked on the Switch 2 or the iPad, where you could touch the screen and pull at Mario’s moustache and distort his head.
That app has built-in screen time limits, where Mario goes to sleep after a while and then the app stops working. He encourages kids to go to sleep too. That makes it more parent-friendly.