| curl-6 said: Apparently Link's Awakening is being made by Grezzo, which means Mario Maker 2 is the only game this year actually produced by EPD. https://gonintendo.com/stories/337996-eiji-aonuma-s-team-is-handling-development-on-zelda-breath-of-th I mean, I can't complain cos there is a metric fuckton of games coming to Switch this year, but Nintendo's core studios aren't being very produtive of late. In fact, looking at their gameography, EPD have not released a big-budget new game since Mario Odyssey in 2017. |
To be honest, I don't think that's much of a problem. The way Nintendo has handled game development for a while now, a lot of their IPs are handled by third party studios or studios which are technically not a part of their main development teams. Yet, the result of the games remain the same, and they're still associated as much with Nintendo as their other main titles. An obvious example is Smash Brothers.
Besides, Nintendo EPD is making Mario Maker 2, co-developing Link's Awakening, and originally Animal Crossing was supposed to come out this year. So really, in the time frame of just over a year they're already releasing two huge titles and co-developing one of them. I don't think that's bad at all.
If anything, it makes me a little bit more excited to see the future of the Switch. I've been very critical of Nintendo for their droughts, and I don't think they should be excused (December 2017 - March 2018, December 2018 - April 2019, and even then both of those just received a smaller title by said month, often it felt like it went on another 2-3 months beyond that). But, it's no secret that Nintendo home consoles have often had an issue with extending their library past the 2nd or 3rd year. Sometimes even when there was a lot of software to buy, if that software wasn't big enough it didn't stop sales from falling drastically. So, releasing games consistently by using other developers aside from EPD, while EPD works on the huge heavy hitters, makes a lot of sense to me. If anything, it's cool to see that Nintendo can rely on other developers to make releases as important as Luigi's Mansion 3 and the like.
So I'm fine with EPD working on 3-4 big titles while they let their other 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party devs handle the other games for them. Making consistent, quality releases that have a big impact is how you'll get a sales curve more comparable to something like the DS.
