Dev team size by game (...doesn't include development times)

Image was published by Nintendo-Online, they've analysed the development team of the Super Mario series over the last 29 years.

More info here: http://nintendo-online.de/artikel/report/18111/inside-nintendo-47-das-super-mario-entwicklerteam-unter-der-lupe

Any more interesting info can be translated by our German speaking users

This is why the franchise sticks around: easy to make, sells a lot, still great games with tons of stuff to do.

To be honest I felt Super Mario 3D World could have been fleshed out a little more. For example, more Mario Kart themed levels or shoot-em-up levels. But maybe time restraints affected such development.

Out of curiosity does anyone know how much people work on, say, COD, Assassins Creed etc?

I wonder how many people it took to make Captain Toad?

Also wonder how much it'd cost in finances and team members to create DLC for 3D world. I know they've ruled that out in interviews, but it clearly is still one of the most expensive, worst-selling Mario games ever made

Holy shit HD development pushed SM3DW well ahead of Galaxy.

Ah.. Remember the old days when an ending didn't have 1 million names to thank and just lasted a minute.. That something i miss.. Nowadays we have 15+ minutes unskippable credits which you have to wait out cause otherwise it won't save you're game of give you the trophy/achievement..

I read assassins creed 4 was made by about 1000 people.

Dont know about numbers but AC:U has 9 different dev teams working on it O_O

Nice chart. Would be even better if it took development time into account. I guess dev time for the 2D games is way shorter than for the 3D ones (like 1 year vs 3 years) which sheds some light on one of Nintendo's biggest problems: Resource allocations. They put lots of resources into games that sell less (3D Mario) and little resources into the games that sell more (2D Mario).

The Dev process for AC games gets pretty huge at certain points. 10 out of 26 of Ubisofts teams are working on Unity (This fall's main AC). There was another article a while back about well over 1000 people involved in last year's AC4.