Game Overthinker V20. An Open Letter to Nintendo.

[Mr Khan]

Azelover said:

famousringo said:

Azelover said:
I just think they haven't been resourceful enough for a market leader which has so little quality third party support. They've been wasting God knows how many resources making the Play On Wii series of remade Gamecube games, which knowing Nintendo, probably took a good 5-6 months of full development time with debugging, and were made by their *gasp* top internal teams(I was shocked by this).

If they're to be doing things like this, they should expand their R&D ASAP, and no, buying a piece of land you haven't even begun construction on yet isn't enough. Heck even Project Sora isn't enough considering they're just starting to expand and establish.

Unfortunately third parties haven't been getting it, so I think it's time Nintendo ramps up development and manage resources properly to create more software soon. Even now the benefits of such expansion wouldn't be seen for a while, they should have started that around 2007.

 

They started in 2004.

Nintendo's R&D budget has been expanding substantially every single year, from $34 million in 2003 to a whopping $370 million in 2007. It's still climbing, last I heard.

That is a huge increase but I'm not seeing the output. We don't know how much of that increase is going to effective game development(ports and City Folk aren't examples). I've been a huge proponent of Nintendo's aim to expand the market ever since the Revolution days, and I've been very apologetic for Nintendo but late last year they dropped the ball. Animal Crossing was not done properly, and making their internal teams do ports was totally counter intuitive IMO. Hopefully they've been more effective in their development with things we haven't seen yet. I just think that, even though they have increased R&D, they need to increase their first party output to make up for the lack of big pushers from third parties, that includes not wasting a lot talent on porting efforts at this point. I'm saying that from the perspective of sales primarily, but I think it matters all around.

I wouldn't think that they would have the whole of their internal teams on the ports. A small team, even if it is a small team of EAD guys, could put it through. Plus it also means that Retro Studios has been used for this purpose as well, but we know they have more capacity than that.

 

This E3 is going to be very interesting indeed. Its high time for a few of their studios to show their hands.