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jarrod on 17 March 2010
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makingmusic476 said:
jarrod said:
Severance said:
jarrod said:
Severance said:

SCE is the biggest first party video game company

 

PSP is the most successful portable gaming device that isn't made by Nintendo.

I'm not quite sure, but I think Nintendo may be larger than SCE now.  It's hard to nail down exact employee counts for SCE given their fractured setup.

And really, iPhone/iPod Touch is the most successful gaming device not made by Nintendo.

Iphone isn't a gaming device.

NGage is a gaming device.

yeah i brought that out because they're both cell phones but one is made to be mainly a phone and the other is mainly gaming device.

and SCE is the biggest first party.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_divisions_of_Nintendo (Go down to "Development Studios" and look at the "internal" list)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment (go to "Internally Owned Studios")

yeah even though they're bigger, they seriously suck at marketing , Normal people don't know any First party studio (Or SCE) , but EVERYONE knows nintendo.

iPhone's a gaming device at this point. It wasn't made with that intention (like NGage) but that's where the market's taken it (unlike NGage).

And you can't just look at studio divisions to determine size (something would would actomatically favor the more fractured structure of SCEWWS versus the internal structure of NCL), you have to look at company size and employee count.   Nintendo employs "over 4000" people at last count, I can't find a solid figure for SCE for comparison (though SCEJ accounts for 1,300).  Nintendo actually also releases more games than SCE, though not all are made internally (in either case).

Actually, SCE and Nintendo have been neck and neck for the past few years.  They passed Nintendo up in their home console offerings around 2001 (ps2 vs GC), while Nintendo still thoroughly dominated them in the handheld arena, but over 2007 and 2008, Sony released more games overall across ps2/ps3/psp/psn than Nintendo released across Wii/DS/WiiWare.  Ironically, Sony fell back behind Nintendo in 2009, because while Sony released more big hitters last year than usual, their overall release slate was considerably smaller than it was the previous few years (down from over 40 games to just shy of 30).

Of course, as you pointed out, not all of these titles were developed internally by either company.

As far as total size of the two companies' internal studios, there's this report from 2007:

“Sony Computer Entertainment Studios employs some 2,200 developers across 14 different studios… it has more programmers, artists, audio technicians and designers than Microsoft and Nintendo combined.”

I assume that figure only covers actual developers, and not hardware designers, testers, etc.  And I'm sure that figure has grown as teams like Guerrilla Games expand and as Sony moves to acquire new studios like Meida Molecule.

Oh, interesting!  I wonder f Develop's released a new report, it'd be really interesting to see how the big guys have shifted workforce wise.

Sony should be bigger, they bought Media Molecule and Guerilla/Santa Monica/Naughty Dog all bulked up iirc, but they also consolidated Studio Liverpool, BigBig and Evolution (with redundancies).  

Nintendo's not really grown that much, though they did start up Project Sora with a new staff in Tokyo.... still, I think that report may not include their consolidated studios like Monolith, Retro, Intelligent Systems, HAL, Brownie Brown, etc, as I doubt they really have 3000+ employees outside R&D (and EAD+SPD+IRD+SDD+NSD+ any other internal NCL groups should only be like 1000 max).  They also reformed NdCube, though who knows what's really happening there.

Microsoft may have actually grown the most since 2007 though, starting up four new game studios (343 industries, Spawnpoint Studio, Firebird Studio, XBLA Productions)  and buying Big Park.  Also, basically all their pedigree studios have started hiring like crazy the past year (Rare, Lionhead & Turn 10).  Rare even started up a second office with 90 employees in Burmingham... Microsoft seems to be on the rise again lately (gearing up for next gen?)...