Is Disney Infinity Saying Goodbye to Webcodes?

Something interesting has begun occurring in Disney Infinity after the last update. Players are finding that any characters they’re using in the console versions are appearing unlocked in the mobile versions of the game regardless of whether a webcode has been entered for that character or not. Usually in order to unlock characters in this version of the game you need to either buy them from the store using real money, or enter a webcode that came in the figure’s packaging.

I wanted to see this for myself, and luckily I had a few characters whose webcodes I lost that I could test this with, as well as a bunch of power discs. I took some screenshots of the app before placing Hiro, Baymax, and the Star Wars discs down, and also took some after. You can see the results below. The characters and discs I used on the console appeared in the iPad app, while those I didn’t stayed locked. So it’s not a matter of every character suddenly being unlocked for whatever reason, it’s definitely only those you play with after downloading the latest patch.

This certainly makes things a lot easier if you’re playing multiple versions of the game, as now not only do you not have to keep the little card and enter it on the website, but you can also unlock your power discs as well! Power discs never came with codes, meaning you had to repurchase them in the digital versions. It’s also great for people like me who have, er… misplaced some of their webcodes, so we don’t need to purchase characters again if we’re playing on our iPad.

However, to make a change like this so far into the series’ lifetime is curious – it gives the impression that webcodes are being phased out, which likely has something to do with support of the PC and Apple TV version of the game seemingly being dropped. After all, if there’s no digital versions of the game left, there’s no point producing webcodes. But if that were the case you wouldn’t think they’d bother implementing an unlock system like this – they’d just stop adding webcodes into future figure and playset packs. Since a lot of players on digital platforms bought webcodes off eBay, or got given webcodes for free from people who didn’t use them, the digital versions of the game were never going to be as profitable as they could have been. Could it be possible that these versions of the game are undergoing a huge overhaul, with the only means of unlocking characters is by either playing the console versions, or buying them as microtransactions in-game? The money made from removing webcodes could be enough to convince Disney to continue supporting the non-console platforms with Infinity, but without cheap webcodes will people adopt the platform as readily? We’ll have to see, but hopefully these platforms will continue to get support in one form or another.

Graveyard image sourced from Nadya Peek on Flickr under Creative Commons 2.0 license with alterations made.