Nintendo announces NFP – Figurines with NFC to use across multiple Nintendo games

Satoru Iwata has taken today’s investor briefing to announce something new amidst the sales figures.

Nintendo are calling it NFP and it’s a range of figurines with NFC in them that will be used across multiple Nintendo games and even on the Nintendo 3DS with an adapter.

The Wii U GamePad has NFC or near field communication built into it. NFP stands for both NFC Featured Platform and Nintendo Figurine Platform. Nintendo says the first figurines and games to support this new platform will be out in 2014. The Nintendo 3DS NFC reader and writer won’t be available until next year however.

“It has been designed to be compatible with multiple software titles for Nintendo platforms.” Iwata told the meeting attendees. “In other words, the figurines, which consumers can buy and collect, are going to work with multiple software titles to be released in the future, and we are aiming to develop more software titles compatible with the figurines.Nintendo has a lot of well-known character IP that has originated in video games, and we have been regularly releasing titles from game franchises that make use of this character IP. This is why I believe a brand-new type of platform will be born when the character IP becomes compatible with NFP”.

Iwata says that this move will allow more than just software and hardware boxes to be on shelves but also a range of Nintendo figures. “This will provide exposure for Nintendo, play a great role in raising our brand awareness and create more opportunities for consumers to play video games.” said Iwata.

While nothing too specific was announced for figurines Iwata did confirm that the figures can have stats saved to the figures and each figure would be unique. “NFP has a writer function as well as a reader function, so it can not only tell what character figurine is on the Wii U GamePad, but also a compact amount of data unique to each game can be written into it and read from it. That is to say, you will be able to customize your NFP to raise or train your own Nintendo characters, for example”. This we imagine would work the same as Disney Infinity or Skylanders does now.

Nintendo says more on NFP will be revealed at E3, which titles will be compatible with NFP and what will be released before the years end.

Is your wallet ready?