Nintendo Labo enjoyed a modest amount of love following its release a few years ago, with the toys-to-life creativity of the sets inspiring gamers to make their own cardboard add-ons, like an actual exercise bike for playing Mario Kart. Labo's star may be on the decline, however, judging by a bit of online re-shuffling the company has done with its various dedicated websites.
Nintendo has always had a penchant for surprising the gaming community with weird and innovative concepts, with a decidedly mixed success rate. When they hit, they hit hard such as the success of unconventional consoles like Switch or the Wii, each of which spearheaded its own revolution in hybrid gaming and motion controls respectively. Nintendo has also had a few high profiles misses including the Wii U or, even more disastrously, the infamous Virtual Boy. Nintendo Labo appears to sit somewhere in the middle, selling over a million units in its first year but seeing its popularity gradually drop off in the intervening time, and it seems Nintendo might have decided to pull the plug, three years after its first release.
The official North American website for Labo now redirects to the site's page for the Labo VR set, prompting many to speculate that this could mean the beginning of the end for Nintendo's cardboard construction craze. It's certainly no official confirmation that the company are planning to discontinue the product, but the fact the site now takes people to the VR set does suggest that that is where Nintendo wants to focus in the future, despite the previous claims of former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime.
It should be noted that Nintendo's websites in the UK and other European countries still send users to the main Labo page, despite most mention of Labo other than its Toy-Con VR kit being scrubbed from the US site. Whether this means that the company's plans for Labo haven't yet been rolled out worldwide or that Labo will enjoy a slightly extended lifespan across the Atlantic is difficult to say at this point, but any Europeans wanting to nab a last Labo kit before the possible end comes should probably do so soon.
Still, perhaps VR will step in to fill the gap. While still a tough sell for many consumers, VR technology has come on in leaps and bounds in the last several years, and is proving an enticing concept to many designers. Even older games are now being remade in VR, like the much-beloved Resident Evil 4 as announced at yesterday's Resident Evil Showcase event.
It's certainly something of a disappointment whenever one of the Japanese gaming giant's bizarre but almost invariably fun experiments comes to a close, and Labo is no exception. The kits encouraged creativity and ingenuity, and brought a novel sense of physicality to a medium that's always been understandably digital. And there's perhaps no other peripheral that can claim to have been used to such great effect in a music video with Ariana Grande and Jimmy Fallon.