Amiibo (əˈmiːboʊ, ; officially stylized as amiibo; plural: Amiibo) is a toys-to-life platform by Nintendo, which was launched in November 2014. It consists of a wireless communications and storage protocol for connecting figurines to the Wii U, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo Switch video game consoles. These figurines are similar in form and functionality to that of the Skylanders, Disney Infinity and Lego Dimensions series of toys-to-life platforms. The Amiibo platform was preannounced to potentially accommodate any form of toy, specifically including general plans for future card games. amiibo use near field communication (NFC) to interact with supported video game software, potentially allowing data to be transferred in and out of games and across multiple platforms.
Amiibo functionality can be used directly with the Nintendo Switch, Wii U, and New Nintendo 3DS consoles by using built-in NFC readers. In addition, the rest of the 3DS hardware line can use an official NFC adapter. By September 2016, Nintendo reported that 39 million amiibo figures had been sold, along with more than 30 million amiibo cards.
By September 2022, total sales reached 77 million toys.
Toys for Bob and its parent company Activision had offered an opportunity for Nintendo to be a partner in a new video game franchise known as Skylanders, which would use RFID-equipped character figurines and a special reader component to interact with the game itself, and could store data on the figurine itself such as the corresponding character's statistics. While Nintendo passed on the exclusivity deal, the franchise itself quickly became one of Activision's most successful franchises upon its launch as a spin-off of the Spyro the Dragon series, and also resulted in competition from Disney Interactive Studios, who released a game with a similar concept known as Disney Infinity in 2013.
In March 2013, Nintendo unveiled Pokémon Rumble U, the first game for the Wii U to use the Wii U GamePad's near-field communications support to enable the use of its own interactive figurines.