Some nameless fools somewhere in the organization thought the idea of selling playable characters at $10 a pop was the best thing since abusing fastpass as a hotel perk.

I believe they looked at Skylanders (after it made the idea of UB Funkeys profitable) and said, "hey we can do that" and shat it out as fast as possible. No different than them making their own MTG/Yugioh clone recently, riding the trends