DonFerrari said:
Considering objectively as sales and metacritic, sure the game have been performing worse, but I don't put that on Kaz doing it for so long (because all we know is that he loves it) but I sure can concede that from time to time to refresh can be useful. Yep we both agree that is possible, but may not be viable or the best option (Sure Nintendo can be wrong, but since I believe they are probably more qualified than us to evaluate that and they haven't increased it I agree to assume they have seen it as not the best option and unless we get proof otherwise I can't say they are wrong). Man you know a plan of action isn't something simple to pull out on short notice, but I'll give a try to sketch why Nintendo didn't do it before. They were coming from WiiU that sure at first suffered from drought and needed more games released and their hard time to adapt to HD era, increasing people wouldn't help they adapt faster I agree, and after the first couple years increasing the team to have more games wouldn't make WiiU sell more and the SW also wouldn't sell much so they would lose money. So the moment they may be looking at increasing is now (you even pointed out they are doing it). Sony is increasing several teams, MS acquired/created 5 studios, Nintendo is also working on it. Sure it won't be day to night that we will see they triple the team. You need to grow organically even more because you need to train and supervise the new guys. But do you think it's impossible to double their size in let's say 5 years? To know if it's possible we would need to do ROI on the increase intended and see if it's attractive and possible. But Nintendo have several IPs they haven't touched in some time so they would have projects to work if they had more teams. So I would say they could invest about 500M a year on creating new teams (like promoting senior members of current teams to lead these new teams and filling the lower ranks). There are a lot of talented part time that hop from one dev to another that Nintendo pedigree could capture. For me particularly it's more a fact of their ROI analysis showing good or bad than lack of qualified personal what limits they creating more games. And considering the tie ratio of Nintendo consoles and Nintendo own marketshare they would need much more HW sales to really have buyers for more games but that is those egg chicken situation of needing to create a market to profit on SW and needing market to profit on SW. |
It would be interesting to see the types of budgets Nintendo provides for their teams and their projects. They not only have Switch and 3DS titles to deal with, but also publishing duties with first and third party titles, providing maintenance with their systems and online infrastructures (take that for what you will), creating and managing the programs they have implemented, producing TV commercials, producing upcoming movies like the Detective Pikachu and Mario movies, possibly creating new animated series (if those are in the works like they hope to do), and producing for the upcoming Universal theme parks.
I think creating more teams is kinda interesting. You got Aonuma heading the Zelda team, Koizumi heading the Mario team as well as general producer of the Nintendo Switch and is now an Executive Director at the board of directors, Nigami heading the Splatoon series and co-heading the Animal Crossing series along with Aya Kyogoku and Katsuya Eguchi, Yabuki heading the Mario Kart and ARMS team, Sakamoto heading the 2D Metroid games, Tanabe heading the Metroid Prime games, Takahashi leading the Xenoblade team from Monolith Soft, etc. That's a lot of teams already. I haven't even mention Game Freak, Masahiro Sakurai and Sora Ltd., Intelligent Systems, Retro, 1-Up, and Nd Cube.
I think creating new teams would have to depend on how and when some of these lower tier developers come up with new gameplay mechanics that develop into new games, or even new IPs. You can't just say "alright, let's get a new team out there to create a new game," and let them just hang out. It's not Nintendo's style. They usually develop gameplay mechanics first before deciding on how it will eventually be implemented. Splatoon didn't just come out the way it did because people like using squids and all, the gameplay mechanics of shooting ink to cover territory was the first thing that was established and, eventually, Inklings would be born along with the world of Splatoon.
And I don't think Nintendo simply just attain talent for hire. Ultimately, we don't know how the process of hiring and nurturing talent works at Nintendo. While Satoru Iwata has done a lot to help Nintendo open up more to the public at large, they have kept staff development mostly close to their chest, which is their right for what its worth.
