I wanted to discuss a bit about how people are complaining that Nintendo doesn't have a steady stream of first-party titles to carry their Wii U machine along... And I had a few thoughts on this.
First, let's face the fact that Nintendo has the most and easily the strongest IPs in the videogame industry. They have many IPs to pull from. The question many forum-goers ask is why they're not using them. And that's something I think is easily answered...
In order to create a steady stream of games, Nintendo would need to expand a LOT. Nintendo would need to grow in size substantially bigger than they are now if they want to make the number of games that gamers are expecting. This means large studios, new buildings, and naturally, an exorbitant expansion of personnel. But this comes at a cost to efficiency...
Anyone who works at big companies knows that the bigger the company becomes, the more complex communication becomes, and naturally the less efficient the company becomes. While I worked at Cisco, they admittedly blended the small-business model in a global-business environment, and with moderate success at that. Essentially, when a company becomes extremely large, it naturally loses its ability to move at the same pace as a small company. Everything just takes a longer time since more people are involved, simply put.
Coming back to Nintendo, as far as I can tell, they choose to follow the small business model as much as they can. They keep their budgets tight, and their work efficient. Growing in size to meet the demand would mean a major loss of efficiency inherent with a massive business, and naturally the budgets have to accomodate this by growing massively as well. This all leads to my final point on the matter: in order to bring games at the pace gamers want from Nintendo, they will need to grow so large that their budgets will become massive, requiring a game to sell 5+ million just to turn a profit. This is what has put many studios out of business.
If Nintendo attempts to pump out the number of exclusives people want, they will have to reach such a size that it will become a requirement that the game sell millions upon millions. This is dangerous waters, and I believe Nintendo knows this, and chooses to stick with the small-business model for this reason.
Thoughts?
