Man Rol good job on yet another comedic thread. But I will put the joke aside as if you never made it and talk about this seriously.
The thread title, "The Legend of Skyward Sword or how one game took down a whole company" I laughed so hard when I read that. Trying to understand your sense of humour. SkyWard Sword didn't take down anything infact it didn't even hold back Nintendo EAD. Look at how many games are coming out of EAD this year, MarioKart, Nintendogs (Already out) and soon to come AnimalCrossing 3DS. Not to mention if we lump in EAD Tokyo we got Super Mario 3D Land. Skyward Sword didn't prevent Nintendo from developing software just as fast as they always have. Infact thats a ton of games coming out within a year or so of each other all from Nintendo EAD. Lets not forget Nintendo confirmed Pikmin which has also been in development for years at EAD. Not to mention any games in development we don't know of. So Skyward Sword didn't even bring down the developer, its not like Nintendo stopped developing any games to shift focus to Skyward Sword that we know of.
Now you say other games could be made with those 200. Now I hope your not talking breaking it up into teams of fifty. Sure a team of fifty can develop a mediocre game in two years. But do you want four mediocre shovel ware titles or one big budget block buster? I mean look at Pikmin Nintendo said it had a small team working on it, well that was back in 08 its now 2011 and the game still hasn't launched. Smaller teams either create mediocre products or take just as long if not longer then a big budget team to create a product not as big.
Look at big budget 3rd party games, their teams can get over 400. Those games still rarely add up to the quality that Nintendo churns out with just 200. Nintendo is managing their IP and franchises. As Miyamoto said either each game is the best possible product or it shouldn't be made.
Nintendo makes quality products and if the team needs to be 200 people strong to release a quality game within 5 years then Nintendo is willing to devote some resources to it. But guess what that doesn't hamper their game production and I'm sure the games come out profitable.
What would kill Nintendo is your idea of releasing plenty of lower budget games instead of quality software. Nintendo should not cut corners and allow their IP's to have lower quality appearances just so that they can release more software. I'd rather see 6 great AAA+ games a year come from Nintendo then 24 mediocre B+ games from those same developers split into smaller teams.
A drop in quality that you are suggesting, now that could bring Nintendo down! A single big budget game(200 people) not in a thousand years!
Also for the user that mentioned Uncharted only taking a team of like 85, well the game while mind blowing only takes about 10 hours to fully complete (According to VGChartz official stats) while Twilight Princess according to those stats takes over 50 hours, 52 to be exact. Now I have heard people who don't collect anything and just blow through it can finish in as little as 14 hours, just to show you how much more content is in a Zelda title compared to Naughty Dog's best. Theirs so much content it took me over 80 hours to beat Zelda TP collecting all of the bugs along the way.
Fact is Nintendo's products carry an expectation that they will be among the best titles in the world. Sure Nintendo could probably pump out an Uncharted like title every two years with an 85-member team, but fact is their products are way higher quality and content driven, it would be impossible for a team of 85 to create nearly as much content and at similiar quality to SS or even TP!
