I wanted to discuss a bit about how people are complaining that Nintendo doesn't have a steady stream of first-party titles to carry their Wii U machine along... And I had a few thoughts on this.

First, let's face the fact that Nintendo has the most and easily the strongest IPs in the videogame industry.  They have many IPs to pull from.  The question many forum-goers ask is why they're not using them.  And that's something I think is easily answered...

In order to create a steady stream of games, Nintendo would need to expand a LOT.  Nintendo would need to grow in size substantially bigger than they are now if they want to make the number of games that gamers are expecting.  This means large studios, new buildings, and naturally, an exorbitant expansion of personnel.  But this comes at a cost to efficiency...

Anyone who works at big companies knows that the bigger the company becomes, the more complex communication becomes, and naturally the less efficient the company becomes.  While I worked at Cisco, they admittedly blended the small-business model in a global-business environment, and with moderate success at that.  Essentially, when a company becomes extremely large, it naturally loses its ability to move at the same pace as a small company.  Everything just takes a longer time since more people are involved, simply put.

Coming back to Nintendo, as far as I can tell, they choose to follow the small business model as much as they can.  They keep their budgets tight, and their work efficient.  Growing in size to meet the demand would mean a major loss of efficiency inherent with a massive business, and naturally the budgets have to accomodate this by growing massively as well.  This all leads to my final point on the matter: in order to bring games at the pace gamers want from Nintendo, they will need to grow so large that their budgets will become massive, requiring a game to sell 5+ million just to turn a profit.  This is what has put many studios out of business.

If Nintendo attempts to pump out the number of exclusives people want, they will have to reach such a size that it will become a requirement that the game sell millions upon millions.  This is dangerous waters, and I believe Nintendo knows this, and chooses to stick with the small-business model for this reason.

Thoughts?

The idea that Nintendo is trying to maintain a lean profile is not too far-fetched, but the problem of game budgets doesn't have much to do with a company's size so much as people who have either little business experience, little industry experience, or both.

Gaming budgets running out of control is a lack of oversight or understanding of the market, not because the process itself is inefficient.

That's the thing, you cannot help that the process becomes more inefficient with a larger personnel size... It's natural!

Not inefficient enough to reflect the budget problems you're describing; actually, it's not always true, since a larger personnel size allows for greater specialization, which actually leads to greater efficiency. Those budget problems are caused by other factors.

They already do this... EAD Tokyo has several smaller "groups"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_Analysis_and_Development

While a large size does allow you to compartmentalize your staff into divisions/departments, you're missing over the fact that the overhead for personnel is quite large.

It boils down to the fact that in the real world, two people working on one thing is not twice as fast as one person working on it.  It's faster, but does not follow a linear growth scale.  This means, while you get it done faster, you doubled the resources to do it.  If I pay two people $15/hr each, they'll get the work done faster, but not twice as fast as one person.  In fact, I could pay the one person $20/hr and he'd be a happier employee, and happy employees are always the most efficient, hahaha!

This is barring the actual ability of the employees, but assuming they're going through a proper hiring process to filter them to a standard, acceptable level, what I'm saying CAN dramatically increase the budget just because the team has grown to 200 people or so, costing nearly 4 times as much as 50 people, but not getting it done 4 times as fast...  People are expensive, plain and simple!

Nintendo has excellent software output, the only problem is that they have a hard time supporting 2 platforms at the same time especially now with HD development taking more time/resources. This is the main reason I believe they should unify the handheld and console business.

They should release a handheld and console with the same or similar specs that allows both devices to play same games. The console version would be slightly more powerful than Wii U, similar to the jump in power from Gamecube to Wii and will render games in 1080p. The handheld version moderately more powerful that Vita, similar to the jump from PSP to 3DS and will render games in 720p. Each sold at $199 at a slight profit.

This type of strategy will let Nintendo essentially support themselves and would allow them to make more new ip and revive old ip by reducing the amount of key franchises needed to be released. Also this will ensure that the console will get all the Japanese 3rd party support that the handhelds are used to getting. Add in the family friendly western games like Lego/Skylanders/Disney/Just Dance or whatever is popular at the time.

Basically they would be the go to devices for Nintendo games/Japanese 3rd parties/western family friendly games. I could see the console version selling 20-30 million and the handheld version selling 50-70 million giving a total of 70-100 million with 200 million units of first party software which should give Nintendo a hefty profit since the hardware will be sold at a profit.

That sounds about right! Anyone who wants more games need only buy another system!

Before that "Fusion" leak, I had predicted Nintendo would unify into a single system that accomplishes both in mid 2013...

I still stand by that prediction.  Nintendo will have a single system that is both a handheld and home console, lol

why not loan out some of there other games for 3rd partys to make like F-Zero, Star Fox, Wave Race and 1080 snowboarding to help fill some of the gaps, we know were gonna get a Metroid at some point from Nintendo and ZeldaU is coming along with X and Bayo2, they need better structure for making & releasing games and 3rd partys making some of the games Nintendo don't want to make right now will take a load off of them and help a lot.