Fun Club It's buck wild to me that Nintendo hasn't made at least 100 Animal Crossing plush toys.

[Derachi]

Animal Crossing New Horizons has sold like 38 million copies, and is the second-best selling Switch game of all time. It's a game whose entire appeal stems not from gameplay, competition, or story, but of two things: Overall Cuteness and Charming Characters.

The game has over 400 unique characters, with names, personalities, and birthdays. More importantly, with that many millions of players, every single Villager character is bound to be some number of people's favourite, with some characters' popularity wildly skyrocketing to ridiculous proportions. Raymond, Shino, Marshal, Sherb, Ankha, Sasha, Judy, Ione, Molly, Maple, Lolly, and the absolutely iconic Bob are a handful that I can just name off the top of my head. So here's my question:

Why hasn't Nintendo made Plush versions of all of these?

Now, they HAVE made SOME plush toys in the past, but mostly of the Non-Villager characters like Tom Nook, KK Slider and Isabelle. The villagers I know they HAVE done are Fauna and Bunnie for New Leaf, and I do know Raymond, Hamlet, Chrissy and Franchine plushes are on the way. But frankly this doesn't seem like NEARLY enough? There are hundreds of villagers, you'd think they'd have capitalized on the game's popularity more and gotten more of the popular villagers out there.

Most importantly... when will they make a plush of my sweet b-b-baby....

 

[Aurc]

I'm in total agreement with ya. It's really weird! Just plenty of the same Isabelle, Nook, etc. merch, which is fine enough, but doesn't really resonate as much as people's actual favorite villagers. I don't think there's any official merch of my personal favorite, my darling angel, Melba:

...But if there was an official plush of her, you bet I'd pay up.

 

[Derachi]

I'm in total agreement with ya. It's really weird! Just plenty of the same Isabelle, Nook, etc. merch, which is fine enough, but doesn't really resonate as much as people's actual favorite villagers.

When they announced they were doing a collab with Build A Bear, I figured that'd be THE Time for this, but no, it was just Isabelle and Tom Nook... AGAIN.

 

[Raccoon]

doing a huge product line like this is tough because you're likely to overproduce some and underproduce others

that plus the initial costs probably makes it prohibitively risky for Nintendo

in any case, I still wouldn't be surprised if the next game has a tie in plush line

 

[Derachi]

doing a huge product line like this is tough because you're likely to overproduce some and underproduce others

that plus the initial costs probably makes it prohibitively risky for Nintendo

in any case, I still wouldn't be surprised if the next game has a tie in plush line

I do know they work with plush manufacturer SANEI for all of their plush needs, so it's not like Nintendo has to do much of the legwork. Plus, I think there's a case to be made that, with a LOT of AC characters sharing a model in-game and only having textures be different, I feel like there's an economy of scale with plush production. Once they have the pattern for a Cat villager, I figure it'd be relatively easy to make ANOTHER Cat villager. Though I also don't know how plushes are made so I could be wrong haha.

 

[Brock Reiher]

would guess the amiibo line bombing will ensure it doest become common for some time

 

[Raccoon]

I do know they work with plush manufacturer SANEI for all of their plush needs, so it's not like Nintendo has to do much of the legwork. Plus, I think there's a case to be made that, with a LOT of AC characters sharing a model in-game and only having textures be different, I feel like there's an economy of scale with plush production. Once they have the pattern for a Cat villager, I figure it'd be relatively easy to make ANOTHER Cat villager. Though I also don't know how plushes are made so I could be wrong haha.

yeah, I don't think it's prohibitively many, but it is a lot of work for a game that did waaaay better than expected.

 

[paranoodle]

I can definitely see how it could be a risk to try to make plushies of every villager (without just on-demand production, which is a different set of logistical puzzles), but I have no idea why they didn't try it for some of the more popular villagers. Some players were already paying each other real money just to get characters like Raymond or Marshal ingame, you can bet there would've been plenty of demand for plushies for those villagers.

 

[Blue Monty]

First it would make sense to make another try at a movie or license the IP to make a short anime, establish some villagers and make plushies of the villagers established in the movie/anime.

 

[Common Knowledge]

would guess the amiibo line bombing will ensure it doest become common for some time

Hey no one told Nintendo they needed to make five hundred trillion of them.

 

[Raccoon]

would guess the amiibo line bombing will ensure it doest become common for some time

to be fair the amiibo line, assuming you mean the figures, was well before animal crossing got big

 

[Brofield]

Most importantly... when will they make a plush of my sweet b-b-baby....

They're not official but I keep meaning to get a plush of my b-b-buddy, the OG homie from the GC (and they offer the hot dog outfit for them all!)

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

Nintendo doesn't really make plushes, do they? If whatever companies license this sort of thing came with a bag of cash asking to make a hundred characters, I'm sure they'd listen.

 

[Clov]

It's probably because of logistics. I do at least agree that they need to make plushies of the two best villagers, Bob and Tangy.

 

[Clov]

Nintendo doesn't really make plushes, do they? If whatever companies license this sort of thing came with a bag of cash asking to make a hundred characters, I'm sure they'd listen.

They actually have made some that are sold at Nintendo Tokyo (like the power-up Mario plushies, or the big reversible "Squid or Octo" Splatoon one), though most of the ones there are produced by outside companies like Sanei.

 

[Nathan Little]

would guess the amiibo line bombing will ensure it doest become common for some time

If they were plushy amiibo, they would have done better, me thinks.

 

[karmitt]

You ain't wrong. I wouldn't mind having a few high quality villager plushes dotting my home.

If they were plushy amiibo, they would have done better, me thinks.

Smart. Not unlike the oversized Yoshi yarn amiibos

 

[Deleted member 540]

Good points about production of the villager line-up, but you'd think Brewster, Blathers and especially Timmy and Tommy would get a lookin.

The lack of official Korok plushies is also strange. Or maybe they do exist and we can't see them because we're not the hero.

 

[MondoMega]

Sanei (Nintendo’s largest plush partner) just teased the second wave of random villager plushes like two weeks ago.



Wave 1 being:



They’ve already done most of the special animals from New Horizons which is why they’re now moving on to these.




Maybe not as expansive as their Mario, Kirby and Pokémon plush lines quite yet, but it’ll get there!

 

[Clov]

Sanei (Nintendo’s largest plush partner) just teased the second wave of random villager plushes like two weeks ago.



Wave 1 being:



They’ve already done most of the special animals from New Horizons which is why they’re now moving on to these.




Maybe not as expansive as their Mario, Kirby and Pokémon plush lines quite yet, but it’ll get there!

We need Bob and Tangy in Wave 2!

 

[Derachi]

Sanei (Nintendo’s largest plush partner) just teased the second wave of random villager plushes like two weeks ago.



Wave 1 being:



They’ve already done most of the special animals from New Horizons which is why they’re now moving on to these.




Maybe not as expansive as their Mario, Kirby and Pokémon plush lines quite yet, but it’ll get there!

I am taking full credit for them announcing this weeks before I started this thread!!!! Haha thanks for the heads up! I’ll follow them on Twitter so I can keep up

We need Bob and Tangy in Wave 2!

Bob is an absolute MUST