What's risky about anything Naughty Dog has ever done?

Im betting their next game is a racer for the PS4.
Every Fifth game they make is a Racer.

I think they do that to get used to new hardware

The problem with listing "Sony" or "Nintendo" is that they're both publishers, as Moren says. Unless you're going to split them up into the individual studios, then they're just too broad to be listed here. Sure, on the whole, they both take a lot of risks, but they also play it safe far more often.

I'd say Valve, potentially. While I think they do have a specialty (first person experiences), they definitely don't play it as safe as other developers. If they did, we'd have seen Half Life 3 a long time ago, purely because that would be a money maker for them however it turned out. They could've monetized TF2 more than they have a long time ago, but they didn't. Etc. etc.

Otherwise, I can't really think of any big developer who I'd call risky. Like I say, plenty of them do take risks, but they're ofset by falling back on proven stuff, which kind of offsets everything. Of course, that's just the state our industry is in these days, so it's unsurprising.

might want to actually look at sales before saying that

http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=Zelda&publisher=&platform=&genre=&minSales=0&results=200

Valve is a publisher too though right? They publish games on steam. Allow 3rd parties to publish games on steam as well.

Half of TP, and almost the 80% was sold during the first holiday. Yes, bad results.

Obviously, they're far bigger than your average run-of-the-mill development studio like say, Media Molecule or Sucker Punch (maybe they're not the best examples, but I'm talking bigger-than-indie but smaller-than-multiple-studios teams).

And they do publish games, but as far as I'm aware, they still just run 1-2 development teams.  And since they only release - on average - one game a year, it still seems like they're smaller than the two mentioned.

Nintendo & Sony push out what, like 10-12 games per year?  Probably more than that, and at least 4-5 internally developed.  If you compare that to Valve's 1 game per year, you can see why I'm drawing a difference between the two.

Nintendo. You guys know how much of a risk it was to push Luigi instead of Mario? Could have ruined the company.

Personally, I wouldn't really include the big publishers here. As Kresnik said, how big of a risk is it to try something new when you have quadruple-A stuff coming out in November?

As for developers, they ALL take risks when they're new, as they're looking for that franchise that will turn them into a success. Someone like BioWare or Bethesda, they changed the industry, but now they're about sequels more than anything else.

Seriously, I don't know how to answer this question any other way than thatgamecompany. Not a single one of their games sounds like it would be popular on paper but they went ahead and made them, anyway.

Brilliant.

Square Enix.

Trying something different when you have such a rabid fanbase is ballsy.