Where does DI go from here?

4.0 is more than likely not going to come out in 2016 as Avalanche has stated this game would have a more drawn out release of merchandise.

Not counting the characters or playsets they have already done, here is a list of upcoming Marvel movies:

Black Panther.
The Inhumans.
Deadpool.
Gambit.
X-Force.
New Mutants.
Dr Strange.

I am uncertain if we should count Fantastic Four 2 as there was no DI playset for the first one.
Age of Apocalypse (X-Men) and Sinister Six (Spiderman) are spinoffs or continuations, so not sure where to classify them.
It would be interesting to see Apocalypse on the big screen though.

I read somewhere that there is some copyright conflict between competing studios regarding X-Men and the mutant concept, so If that is still disputed, I would say the odds of seeing mutants in DI are not that high.

A pity, Domino (X-Force), Surge, Laura and Mercury (New Mutants) are characters I'd love to have.

Black Bolt, Medusa and Crystal (Inhumans) would also be nice.
I wonder if Lockjaw would be on the list, but not sure if the game can support a character who teleports.
Triton would most likely be excluded, as he is a swimming character and DI still hasn't solved that problem.

Animals!

We have releasing currently or in the in next 12 months:

The Lion Guard
Finding Dory
Jungle Book
Zootopia
Last Dinosaur

Never been a more opportune time to do 4 legged and no legged characters and tie them in to big theatrical releases or Disney Junior releases.

Zootopia plans are already complete

If you meant Good Dinosaur, we got no quadruped playable characters of out that movie, just 4 mounts.

So I guess we won't be seeing animals any time soon.
Swimming characters are extremely unlikely, DI has never solved the complex mechanics for that movement medium yet.

Well that is exactly why this is where Disney Infinity needs to go.

Innovation is how you move forward, I'm sure Infinity wouldn't be the first game ever to feature 4 legged animals or swimming fish if it managed to code it. And the next 12 months is there best financial window to enter featuring animals with all the current and soon to hit tv/theatres titles.

As for Good Dinosaur the only playable character we have is Spot, that's why it would be great to expand to Arlo, Butch and co

Hopefully we don'y go on re-hashing Marvel characters and Star Wars as the way to promote the next Infinity.

In 2 years time I'm sure the Frozen sequel will be one of the launch playsets.

It's not a matter of coding the animal mechanics for 4 legged or swimming.

It's making that work in the context of the Toy Box effectively and staying true to the characters.

A stand alone Finding Dory game is easy. Making a Finding Dory playset AND having those characters functionally work in the Toy Box portion of the game is the hangup.

Yeah, as Romulus77 said, the issue is logistics, not coding. It's all well and good to say "let's make Pongo playable", but that then raises a ton of issues. How does he drive vehicles? How does he hold weapons? How does he hold onto ledges whilst platforming? How does he carry another character or townsperson? That's just a few of them! Then the problem is further compounded by the fact that you can't just do this once and then apply it to all animal characters. Pongo would behave differently to Dumbo who would behave differently to Bambi, and so on and so forth. It's even harder for aquatic characters. Then you have to start worrying about how they'd even be able to move around!

It's not a matter of them being unable to add animal characters, it's about whether it's worth going to so much effort adding them when there's still tons of other characters they could add instead that people would buy.

They just don't want a repeat of the Cars, characters that are good for a playset but are more or less useless in the Toy Box. If they ever do Ariel though, she can be a mermaid in the playset/water sections, and then be in her human form in the Toy Box.

I think it was a great idea having something like Speedway in 3.0, essentially the first new content that works really well with the Cars characters, and something that has the possibility of being updated with new tracks and modes each year. Creating new content specifically for the more restricted characters is a good compromise between not having them in the game at all. I could see this happening with water based and animals characters, to keep them interesting after their playsets are completed.