You think they are inefficient because they take more time to work on their games. But they are extremely efficient with the size of their dev teams, which keeps their budgets in check as well. Making more polished and more focused games than other developers at lower cost and with fewer workers makes Nintendo one of the most efficient developers in the business.

You just want this game to be finished right now because you think it looks like it could be cobbled together in a few hours. But you can clearly see how many features have been added to the game since E3 (including two new palettes, which contrary to your perception does in fact take more work than just dragging and dropping assets from Nintendo's Super Mario World flash drive). You don't seem to have thought much about the game, because it does have many new "assets" -- not so much in terms of sprites and models, but new animations and enemy behaviors (plus some new music). It also seems to greatly accomodate player creativity, giving you the ability to create weird and completely new combinations of elements, with a very intuitive interface that almost begs the player to think, "I wonder if...?" and try it, and get something crazy because the dev team expected the player to think that. The sort of nutty shit the dev team wouldn't have much time to think of if they were told to finish the game in 3 months because it has to be done yesterday.

"This never appeared in the original Super Mario Bros. or Mario Bros. 3, so it's a completely new asset for these games." "This gives Lakitu a new animation..." "These spinies have a completely new ability..." "Each game has an equivalent for each level element. However there are some cases where it looks like brand new assets had to be created in order to provide those equivalents.... Just how many new assets were created for Mario Maker?" "Despite emulating the look of the old games, some new graphical touches have been added."

But surely all of these things could have been done in a few days or whatever, because you don't think they sound like a lot of work. Also they're probably the only new things in the game, surely there isn't anything unexpected in this game that wasn't shown in the one-minute long Game Awards trailer.

This is the third or fourth time I've seen this thread topic come up since August. I have my doubts on PAL getting a game each month, the theory already starts to flounder at the beginning of the year with Kirby missing its Jan/Feb release.

They're efficient for their size, sure, but real efficiency would have been doubling their workforce last gen in preparation for the added workload of current gen development.

And since the physics and collision boxes presumably have to stay the same so a designed level works across all pallettes, then yeah, it would essentially be just an object swap, wouldn't it? The new features are nice, but having the assets already in place reduces the workload a lot.

You can have all of your game's music composed by Koji Kondo and finish it in a year, or you can finish it in 4 months with one-third of the music composed by Kondo and the rest composed by two people who were unemployed at the time development started.

If that's not a strong enough example, how about if you could have your whole film directed by Stephen Spielberg, or one-third of it directed by him and the rest by two out-of-work directors.

The same applies to every other role in the development process. It's not to say that Nintendo shouldn't be training younger designers to take the place of the older ones in time, but the best games are made when everyone who touches them has the same vision. The more people touching them, the harder it is to maintain this focus -- and to supervise them all and make sure everyone is doing quality work.

I don't see what Mario Maker has to do with the added workload of current-gen development, either. As far as I can see this game would have taken pretty much the same amount of time to make on Wii or on 3DS. One year is a reduced workload dev time. New Super Mario games had dev times of three years. Hell, Wind Waker HD took six months to make! Why should Mario Maker, a game that actually has brand new assets and content, take less time than that?

You actually make a good point, but I still think the amount of delays on Wii U, (not that Nintendo are by any means alone in this department, of course) are indicative of the same underestimation of HD development that hit just about every other major developer in the early years of the PS3 and 360.

If they would just localize Dragon Quest X (console exclusive, though I did think they talked about bringing it to PC) and Fatal Frame we could be well over 12.

They certainly were. But Mario Maker was never delayed (to our knowledge) and is the third HD game being made by EAD 4 (fourth counting NSLU). So it's not exactly an early-generation game for this particular developer.

Regardless, we don't know the whole development period. Did work on Mario Maker begin after NSLU was released? Or perhaps after the Pikmin DLC was finished? Maybe it only had a small core group of designers working on it for a short time.

Damn I wish Iwata Asks would come back.

Mario Maker initially looked like it used the Nintendo Web Framework engine, there were similarities with Mario vs. Donkey Kong. But as time went on and they showed more, it developed into something I don't think the NWF can pull off. Not sure if they switched during the development when they saw the game showed progress, but as a NWF it should have been easily made. Even Mario vs. Donkey Kong which was a NWF game is being released next year.

Not 12 AAA titles that is for sure.

Agreed on Iwata Asks.

Can we really count Mario Maker as a "HD game" in terms of development though? I reckon it's probably no more demanding in that regard than a Wii title.