Amiibo, Nintendo's entry in the "toys-to-life" gaming accessory business that also includes Activision's Skylanders and Disney's Infinity, seems to be off to a fairly good start. But it could have been better. Much better.

Last week, Nintendo reported strong early sales of Amiibo, the interactive figurines of mascots like Mario, Yoshi and Link that will work with a variety of games. The company's big holiday game for the Wii U console, Super Smash Bros., has sold 710,000 copies in the United States, and Amiibo sales were "approximately equal to sales of Super Smash Bros. so far."

Selling "approximately" three quarters of a million pieces of cheap plastic containing cheap NFC chips—so cheap they apparently also are used in Russian transit cards—for $13.99 each is great for a company hoping to achieve profitability after three years in the red. If—if— Nintendo plays its cards right, Amiibo could be a lucrative revenue stream for the Wii U, Nintendo 3DS and beyond. So far, Nintendo has played a few cards right, but it's also thrown some aces into the discard pile. Here's what's gone right and wrong with Amiibo.

What Went Right —————

Releasing Amiibo in the first place. Nintendo doesn't typically chase the competition. But in this case, it identified a golden opportunity to get into a space that's been a success for Activision and Disney. It had the clout to get retail shelf space, and very popular characters to turn into interactive toys. There aren't many publishers with the intellectual property and wherewithal to pull this off, which is another reason for Nintendo to get into the business. There's not likely to be other significant competitors in the space.

Nintendo

Functionality across platforms and games. Competing figures work only within a single game series. Amiibo eventually will be used in a range of games across home and portable platforms. Nintendo's certainly hoping this creates a virtuous cycle: Buy the game, buy the Amiibo, buy the next game because it uses the Amiibo you already have. Players would see Amiibo figurines not as an impulse purchase to be traded in at GameStop after the game has run its course, but as an accessory to hold on to for exclusive bonuses down the line. There's a long-game element here.

Tying the launch to Super Smash Bros. While Amiibo's potential strength lies in their cross-game, cross-platform functionality, it was imperative to tie them to what probably will be Nintendo's best-selling Wii U game, to spur interest and sales out of the gate and let retailers upsell an Amiibo or two (or 10).

What Maybe Went Right or Maybe Wrong ————————————

How Amiibos are used. Nintendo's first explanation of how Amiibos work in Super Smash, provided at E3, was confusing. I paid careful attention and left thinking you'd put your Amiibo figure on the Wii U controller, then control that character in the game. Makes sense, right? As it turns out, the Amiibo activates an AI character that you can team up with or compete against. As you play it, it "learns" how to fight and counteract your moves.

This seems to have caught on at least somewhat. Some players are anthropomorphizing their Amiibo—when they lose a tournament to a figurine, it's funny and cute and gets written about on Kotaku, even though all that happened was they lost to a computer. I lost a boss battle in Suikoden last night, which is the same thing, and nobody's emailing me for pics.

What's more, how Amiibos are being used in other games is, so far, not terribly interesting. Use the Link Amiibo with Hyrule Warriors and you unlock a new weapon. Use the Samus Aran Amiibo with Mario Kart 8 to dress your character like Samus. They're smartly done, but they add minimal amounts of fun. It's not nearly as compelling as, say, a Skylanders game in which each figurine gives you a new controllable character with which to play through the game.

What Went Wrong —————

Design. Nintendo showed off prototype Amiibo figures at E3, and they looked good.

Too good.

Nintendo

Production figures were significantly less impressive. Simple, rotund, stable characters like Kirby (a pink ball with eyes) made it through relatively unaltered. But characters that were more human-proportioned and had a lot of fine detail did not. Faces looked derpy, intricate sculpted fingers looked like blobs. And many figures had giant, distracting rods supporting their arms and legs.

Once the figures shipped, the ugly bits weren't consistent across figures, and collectors found themselves shuffling through racks to find a Marth figure without a droopy sword, a Peach figure with the eyeballs painted in a manner that did not suggest she needed corrective lenses, a Samus figure that didn't look like she was dancing during the instrumental portion of "Smooth Criminal."

Nintendo copied and pasted these figures' poses from Super Smash Bros. What it should have done was designed them first and foremost to be great figurines. Nintendo should have known this, because it's from the company's own playbook. "We always draw the dot character first, and from that, we make other art work, for the package for example," Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto said long ago. "We gave [Mario] a mustache rather than a mouth because that showed up better."

This is what happens when you forget your own history—or when you're really pressed for time.

Supply. Nintendo is going to launch a lot of Amiibos this fiscal year: 29, to be exact. Some will sell better than others. You won't be surprised to hear Link, Mario and Pikachu were the top-selling figures in North America. And you wouldn't be shocked to know an Amiibo figure of the personal trainer character from Wii Fit was not expected to sell as well as Mario. The last thing Nintendo wanted to do was to clutter retail shelves with unwanted figures.

But it's not as if the demand for Wii Fit Trainer is zero. So Nintendo did ship some of them. Thinking back, there were two potential solutions Nintendo could have tried:

Ship assortments of figures that contained 10 Marios for every one Wii Fit Trainer, but keep supplying stores with small numbers of them to fill demand. Identify certain figures as limited editions, and warn people that they'd have to pre-order one or otherwise ensure that everyone who wants one gets one within a limited window.

But in the words of Arlo Guthrie, there was a third possibility that we hadn't even counted upon—that Nintendo would make one shipment of limited-edition figures but not tell anyone that they would be an extremely limited-time offer, they would sell out almost immediately, and they would not be replenished. And this is precisely what happened. If you didn't have the foresight to spend $156 ($13 x 12) plus tax on Amiibo figures on launch day while already shelling out $60 for the game and more for the accessories, you were SOL.

Nintendo

So now there are certain Amiibos—Marth, Villager—that regularly command $70 or more on eBay. The the only reason that hasn't gone higher is because there is no analogous supply-demand gap in Europe or Japan. Since Amiibo figures are region-free, there's an arbitrage opportunity for savvy folks in Europe and Japan, who are snapping up Amiibos and reselling them at a tidy profit. Even after the markup and shipping, that's still cheaper than buying one here in the states.

Communication. Nature abhors a vacuum. With no official guidance from Nintendo, rumors and speculation filled the void. Some smaller retailers started reporting being told they could not get any more of the limited-edition Amiibo figures, ever. Days later, Nintendo finally issued a comment:

We will aim for certain amiibo to always be available. These will be for our most popular characters like Mario and Link. Due to shelf space constraints, other figures likely will not return to the market once they have sold through their initial shipment.

Nintendo finally confirmed some of its figures were indeed one-and-done, but still wasn't answering all the questions. Which figures had been discontinued after that first shipment—and which of the upcoming figures should be purchased immediately, lest they disappear? And what's that "likely" doing there? Is that allowing for the fact there might be a box that fell behind a shelf in Best Buy's stock room, or a hedge against later reprints? And how much later? Before Christmas? What's the lead time?

Days later, Nintendo updated this statement.

Some amiibo were very popular at launch, and it is possible that some amiibo in the United States, Canada and Latin America may not be available right now due to high demand and our efforts to manage shelf space during the launch period. Certain sold-out amiibo may return to these markets at a later stage. We are continually aiming to always have a regular supply of amiibo in the marketplace and there are many waves of amiibo to come.

Again, no specifics, no fair warning about what might happen later, just a note that Nintendo reserves the right to bring them back if it feels like it, when it feels like it.

All this has caused is confusion. There are still poor souls out there—I see them on Twitter—thinking Wii Fit Trainer will come back any day now, and they just have to keep checking their local Best Buy.

Compare these vague, non-committal replies to Nintendo's recent statement as regards the GameCube Controller Adapter, another Wii U accessory that has been hard to find this holiday:

Both the Super Smash Bros. Edition Nintendo GameCube Controller and the Adapter that connects it to the Wii U console remain in distribution in the North American region. Nintendo of America is doing everything we can to meet the strong demand for these products, and additional stock will be made available and delivered to retailers. We ask consumers to contact their local retailers directly regarding availability.

No equivocation. No wishy-washy language. No questions: We're making more, we're sending more to stores, please call your retailers, we're cranking them out.

The way Amiibos have been handled—in America at least, since Europe and Japan seem to have an Amiibo surplus—has been terrible for consumers. I'm not even sure if it's been good for Nintendo. If you only have a certain amount of money to spend on videogames this year, and $75 of it goes to someone reselling an Amiibo on eBay, that's money Nintendo's not making. If Japanese Amiibos are leaving the country, that's upsetting the supply and demand balance on Nintendo's home turf.

If Nintendo wants Amiibos to keep doing well, it's got to make it possible for fans to collect them without going crazy. You can only pull the Beanie Baby move for so long before it blows up in your face.