This past year has been good to Nintendo Co Ltd, at least financially. Earlier this month, the 126-year-old Japanese game maker released an earnings report showing that the company had  achieved its best Q1 in three years.

One of the biggest contributors to that success is Nintendo Amiibo, the insanely popular toys-to-life collectibles that can interact with Nintendo systems through NFC, and this week Nintendo revealed that it has sold an amazing 10.5 million Amiibo figures between their release in November 2014 and the end of March 2015.

Despite or perhaps because of their popularity, some Amiibo figures have been notoriously hard to get a hold of, but then again, supply issues are nothing new to Nintendo. Earlier this year, several Nintendo products including Amiibo were held up by labor disputes within the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which delayed dozens of container ships for weeks on end. The demand has sometimes gotten so out of hand that following an announcement of new Amiibo, users crashed Gamestop’s site as thousands of people tried to simultaneously pre-order the figures.

Amiibo are just one of several toys-to-live series that have launched in the last few years. Others include Activision Inc’s Skylanders, Disney Infinity and Lego Dimensions. During Nintendo’s somewhat unpopular E3 press event, the company announced that it had partnered with Activision to create several Amiibo/Skylanders crossover figures, which will be Nintendo characters that can be used in both game types. Unsurprisingly, the crossover figures will only function with the Wii U and 3DS versions of Skylanders games, and they will not be compatible with PlayStation 4 or Xbox One versions.

Whether Amiibo represents the future of Nintendo or if it is just another passing toy fad remains to be seen, but for now the palm-sized figures have helped Nintendo weather the storm of the lackluster sales of Wii U. According to the same report that released the Amiibo sales figures, the Wii U has sold less than 10 million units in the last two and a half years.

Meanwhile, Sony Corp’s PlayStation 4 has sold over 25 million units in less than two years, putting it on track to potentially overtake the PlayStation 2 as the best-selling game console of all time.

Photo by FaruSantos