Soundwave said:
Retro is kept on a tight leash, a one team studio that's only allowed to work on 1 game at a time. Slowly. Another example of Nintendo being afraid of trusting a Western developer. Monolith is a good find, but not enough. I believe the Pikmin 3 team has been working on other games like the NSMB games during that time period too, Pikmin isn't big enough of a priority at Nintendo to get in the way of Mario. Rare was bigger than Retro + Monolith + Next Level Games + Monster Games combined. They were almost half of Nintendo's output during the N64 days ... GoldenEye, Jet Force Gemini, Blast Corps, Killer Instinct Gold, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, Mickey Speedway, Diddy Kong Racing, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Donkey Kong 64 = 11 games, or an average of 2 game releases/year during the N64 era, not even counting Game Boy content. EAD put out Mario 64, Zelda: OoT, Zelda: MM, Yoshi's Story, 1080, F-Zero X, Wave Race 64, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64 = 8 titles. Other North American alliances brought Pilotwings 64, NBA Courtside 1 + 2, Ken Griffey Jr. MLB, Excitebike 64, Starcraft 64, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Star Wars: Battle for Naboo, Tetrisphere, etc. Other Japan studios brough Paper Mario, Pokemon Snap, Mario Party 1-3, Pokemon Stadium 1/2, Super Smash Bros. You can see there's a pretty even balance here, Rare actually produced more software than EAD did for the N64. Losing Rare or specifically their output was like a sports team losing their second highest scoring player and then doing nothing to replace him. Of course the team (err ... future consoles) are going to have issues. Losing Rare's output is actually probably a fair reason why they dropped from 33 million N64 owners to 23 million GameCube owners. |
I'd attribute the GCN's lower sales more to the fact that they made bad creative decisions with so many of their core franchises (3D Mario, Zelda, Mario Kart, Starfox) instead of pursuing their N64 approaches.
And there's still no reason for Pikmin 3 to have been delayed so much. Nothing we've seen indicates it's any more complex than its predecessors with exception of a pretty modest graphical facelift.