Categories

Activision gives Skylanders Giants the all-in, mega-investment treatment (hands-on preview)

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 4 min

Activision Blizzard has gone all-in on its bet on the Skylanders franchise. Last year’s Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure was the top new video game franchise of 2011, and consumers purchased the toys associated with the game characters  more than 40 million times.  If stacked on top of each other, those toys would form a tower that is 2,300 miles high; and the population of Skylanders toys sold now exceeds the population of England. So the company is pulling out all of the stops for the sequel, Skylanders Giants.

Unlock premium content and VIP community perks with GB M A X! Join now to enjoy our free and premium perks. 

Join now →

Sign in to your account.

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.