Enough of the Nintendo Conspiracy Theory

[Mnementh]

pokoko said:

Mnementh said:

Some gamers simply tend to ignore japanese devs (while others do the same with western devs). So IF you ignore japanese devs and IF you ignore handhelds, you might get the impression Nintendo gets bad 3rd-party support. But even that is not true. While western devs are not very aggressive for bringing out games for Nintendo-platforms, it isn't nothing as if they do nothing. Look at Ubisoft, WB or Activision, they do support even the struggling WiiU well. Only EA is missing (the effort of Ubisoft and Activision show that the simple ports turn profit even at the low sales, so EA does that for other reasons).

So, in reality, no conspiracy is at work here, Nintendo gets 3rd-party-support.

That's true.  Nintendo has a lot of communication with Sega, Capcom, Atlus, and others.  We know that for a fact.  Nintendo works with Japanese developers.  They go around and they talk with the biggest of the western developers, like Activision, Ubisoft, and even EA.  They hammer out partnerships with all of those.

However, the area where I think Nintendo deserves criticism is for where they don't put in the extra effort.  Bethesda and Gearbox both recently said that Nintendo doesn't really communicate with them.  Microsoft and Sony do, but not Nintendo.  Now, neither one is an Activision, but they're both pretty big and both have had hit franchises this gen.  If both of those have little contact with Nintendo then what about all the other mid-level developers and publishers?  I doubt it's an isolated situation.  Simply stated, you can't expect support if you're not proactive about securing it.

Honestly, I'm not sure where the blame should go.  Nintendo of America?  Top level Japanese management?  I don't know.  It just seems to me that they didn't do everything they could have, especially after talking about a renewed effort to target the core.

Nintendo is a very Japan-centric company. While Sony has studios all over the world and MS has it's studios mostly in the West, Nintendo has nearly all dev capacity in Japan. Even more, all dev-capacity is more or less controlled directly by NoJ. Monolith, Retro, Gamefreak/Pokemon Company/Creatures and Intelligent are a bit more independent and I'm not sure about HAL. But these are all also japanese devs, with the exception of Retro. So it is only natural, that they have better contacts with japanese devs: no cultural barriers, same language and much less to travel to meet them.

So what is wrong or who is wrong? I think Nintendo should build more external studios and much more western dev-capabilities. I already said that here on VGC sometimes. That would also create better contacts to western devs, because the communication is easier.

Why they don't do that? I don't know, but I suspect NoJ wants to control game-development strongly. That works better if the devs are near and even better if they are inhouse. What at least half of the dev-capabilities are.