Source: iMore
amiibo were Nintendo s answer to the toys-to-life phenomenon that Disney Infinity and Skylanders made so popular. Starting in 2014, during the Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo Wii U era, these plastic figurines promised a whole new way to interact with your games while providing some cute memorabilia for your shelf. The figurines facilitated this through the Near Field Communication (NFC) chips stored in their bases, which could be scanned and read or write data to themselves or a game, depending on the title.
This pleased many fans initially, as some figures to be released depicted characters that did not receive any significant merchandise or at least, not very often. In addition, Nintendo reassured that amiibo would work across several games this meant that your Super Mario line Peach amiibo would work just as well as your Super Smash Bros. line Peach amiibo, in any game that supported a Peach amiibo. But as time went by, the opinion on whether amiibo are a nice add