Mazzy said:
Hmm, still blows my mind to see what small indie teams and smaller studios do, and yet Star Fox Zero which looks like something thrown together in an intern's basement on a shoestring budget actually took 140 people and two years. I guess this is that ballooning AAA budget rearing its ugly head, and I guess I just never really envisioned that applying to Nintendo for some reason. Where do these ballooning costs come from? I mean Gears of War 3 had 4-5x the budget of Gears of War 1 but felt similar in size, scope, polish, etc. Is it marketing? Increasing team size (but then wouldn't that make up for it by leading to them churning out games faster)? Regardless, glad to hear Star Fox Zero is a flop though, would hate to see a game like that succeed. Do you have any insight on Dark Souls 3's budget and how it compares to other games in the series? I've always imagined Dark Souls 3 was a fairly low budget game, and despite being such a big seller (playing DeS back in 2009 never would I have imagined that a Souls game would top the charts), it doesn't have that AAA feel in the gameplay, graphics, and presentation. It's always nice to hear about a really great, low budget game doing really well for itself and doing AAA numbers despite its meager budget, and bucking the trend. But if Star Fox Zero cost in the ballpark of 30m USD as you say, I'd have to rethink how I look at these games' budgets, and Dark Souls 3 likely isn't as low-budget as I imagine. |
It comes from Kyoto's corporate hierarchy, unfortunately. Here's a great quote by Dan Adelman who worked at Nintendo of America explaining the situation:
Dan Adelman: "Nintendo is not only a Japanese company, it is a Kyoto-based company. For people who aren’t familiar, Kyoto-based are to Japanese companies as Japanese companies are to US companies. They’re very traditional, and very focused on hierarchy and group decision making. Unfortunately, that creates a culture where everyone is an advisor and no one is a decision maker – but almost everyone has veto power.
Even Mr. Iwata is often loathe to make a decision that will alienate one of the executives in Japan, so to get anything done, it requires laying a lot of groundwork: talking to the different groups, securing their buy-in, and using that buy-in to get others on board. At the subsidiary level, this is even more pronounced, since people have to go through this process first at NOA or NOE (or sometimes both) and then all over again with headquarters. All of this is not necessarily a bad thing, though it can be very inefficient and time consuming. The biggest risk is that at any step in that process, if someone flat out says no, the proposal is as good as dead. So in general, bolder ideas don’t get through the process unless they originate at the top.
There are two other problems that come to mind. First, at the risk of sounding ageist, because of the hierarchical nature of Japanese companies, it winds up being that the most senior executives at the company cut their teeth during NES and Super NES days and do not really understand modern gaming, so adopting things like online gaming, account systems, friends lists, as well as understanding the rise of PC gaming has been very slow. Ideas often get shut down prematurely just because some people with the power to veto an idea simply don’t understand it.
The last problem is that there is very little reason to try and push these ideas. Risk taking is generally not really rewarded. Long-term loyalty is ultimately what gets rewarded, so the easiest path is simply to stay the course. I’d love to see Nintendo make a more concerted effort to encourage people at all levels of the company to feel empowered to push through ambitious proposals, and then get rewarded for doing so."
The reason that indie developers can accomplish so much is a function of their design: they are passion projects created by a few visionaries who really want to see something special come to life.
It's much, much harder for a company like Nintendo to accomplish that----they are far too weighed down by their stubborn and rigid hierarchial management structure.
Splatoon is a great example of what happens when Nintendo lets its younger developers roam free...we end up with an IP that's refreshingly bold and non-derivative filled to the brim with great ideas (and Splatoon was created with only 89 people excluding debugging and localization!)
Star Fox Zero is classic group think and classic Kyoto management style, unfortunately. Instead of taking the series in a bold direction they created essentially a remake of Star Fox 64 which was a remake of Star Fox SNES...which nobody wanted. The planners and producers thought they could just literally make the same game over again and we would love it just the same as we did in 1997 while shunning so many of the modern sensibilities that modern gamers require...it's shockingly out of touch with the current market.
Sure, some of the younger developers might have been against it. But they're powerless to stop it.
I think Star Fox Zero was made with the goal of being a budget project they could easily crank out, like Mario Party 10 and Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash, but instead became a development nightmare that started to balloon out of control.
Regarding Dark Souls 3...it's really deceptive. We tend to think game budgets are a lot smaller than they really are. I just counted the Dark Souls 3 credits from a YouTube video....excluding localization, testing, voice acting, and debugging, I have 397 people who worked on Dark Souls 3 proper. If there's approx. 200 From Software developers, that leaves almost as many contractors that they hired to finish the project. So you can imagine...Dark Souls 3 is a pretty massive production....which makes sense because Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 1 were very profitable. It's much larger than Star Fox Zero in this regard.
The main reason behind the large production is because the game was created so quickly---it was developed from start to finish in only 24 months after Dark Souls 2.
