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curl-6 on 20 November 2016
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zorg1000 said:
curl-6 said:

They are worse than most of the rest of the industry. Nintendo have delayed more games this gen than most other publishers.

I meant in terms of how long the delays are, the majority of Nintendo delays are for a few months like most other publishers.

Your other argument was that other publishers were thriving without realizing that Nintendo has sold more software than any other publisher this generation.

Selling software is only half the battle when you're a first party. They also need to sell hardware, and in that regard they're not doing so well, in significant part because of software delays and the resulting game droughts.

 

Wyrdness said:
curl-6 said:

Studios come and go, but the AAA machine itself shows no sign of collapse. Publishers like Sony, Microsoft, Activision, Bethesda, etc are doing just fine.

And Zelda would not be damaged if BotW was released a bit unpolished. Games like Elder Scrolls and GTA have remained massive for decades despite not being the most polished games. Skyward Sword already shipped with a potentially game-breaking bug. Nintendo's delays and the resulting droughts have led to immense failure for them this generation, while publishers that are less anal about polish are doing far better.

Studios and developers dropping off is a sign of future collapse for the AAA approach, a number of developers and designers like Ken Levine have stated their future plans no longer include accomodating such an approach, eventually AAA approach will be reduced back to what it was in the 90s a once in a while thing as rising development costs can no longer sustain the approach for prolonged periods, it will be one AAA every few years and thats it. This gen is set to sell far fewer harder than the last meaning a smaller pool of gamers to potentially migrate into the next, AAA costs will again rise, it's simple math as eventually the won't be a big enough consumer base to sustain the approach as the AAA approach requires the userbase grow significantly each gen with out fail. More hardware was sold last gen than any other yet a large number of developers went under.

Zelda would be damaged by being unpolished because the series has gathered a reputation for it, GTA may have some issues but it's way more polished then many other games. Nintendo's delays didn't lead to this gen it's the handling of the Wii U that did as it was them trying to listen to other people rather than do their own thing, again other publishers aren't doing better than them Nintendo has sold the most software among them.

See, I've been hearing this same claim of imminent AAA apocalypse for years now, yet it hasn't happened. It's starting to feel a bit like those proclamations of the world ending that keep getting pushed back, from the cold war, to Y2K, to bird flu, to 2012, to whatever the next big scare is. It hasn't happened, and I'm confident that 5 or 10 years from now, it still won't have happened. AAA games still dominate the charts and sell multiple million year in and year out. They're not going anywhere. This fabled collapse is, IMO, the wishful thinking of people who don't like the AAA business model.

The Wii U's severe game droughts were a significiant factor in its failure. Those droughts were often caused by a failure to meet software deadlines. If Wii U had no game droughts, it wouldn't have been such a disaster.