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sc94597 on 06 April 2015
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Teeqoz said:
sc94597 said:
You only considered revenue and royalty cost. There are so many IMPLICIT costs they'd have to incur if they went third party.


Such as porting? It's already been debunked by Kapi, it's pretty cheap actually.

Or like.... SDKs? Engines? All of those are so (relatively) cheap that they would be non issues for Nintendo.

1. Lesser brand identity. A lot of would-be niche Nintendo games sell well because they are first-party games, and almost guaranteed quality. This wouldn't be a cost if Nintendo could guarantee quality of these games, but there are other things to consider that might affect the quality/quantity of their games, which I will further delineate. 

2. Higher development costs. Nintendo games will compete even more with other third-parties. That means the budgets of said games will have to match their own budgets. Furthermore, Nintendo games would have to take advantage of the hardware in which they are building them for, in other words, the already struggling Nintendo with just Wii U level hardware would have to struggle much greater on PS4/Xbone level hardware. The main reason why Nintendo makes weak platforms isn't the cost of hardware (otherwise they wouldn't make the gamepad) it is the cost of software. They realize that more powerful harware => high software costs if you want to compete with AAA game developers. As it is now, Nintendo games are always noted with, "it looks good - for the wii/wii u." 

3. Not having games tailored to specifically designed hardware. Often (if not always) Nintendo designs their hardware in order to affect their software development. This has been true since the NES. Nintendo as a company would have to functionally rework how they make their games. A clear example of this is point #2, but another example would be control schemes and mechanisms. Such a transition would induce costs, as Nintendo games are usually good because they interact with unique hardware so well. If NIntendo has very little input in the hardware of the platforms it releases games on they need to do more to fit the standards of said platform manufacturers. 

Those are just a few I've thought of on the top of my head. I'm sure if we knew more about the inner-workings of Nintendo we can come up with dozens. The assumption made is that there won't be road-blocks in the transition from first-party publisher to third party publisher, and the argument I'm making is that said assumption can't be made realistically. If said assumption can't be made realistically, then there are implicit costs involved.