I thought of that too. To be fair, Ubisoft Montreal probably has more employees than all of the EAD studios combined, and I doubt the teams making Child of Light and Ass Creed Unity had any more common devs than those making Mario Kart 8 and Captain Toad.

I don't know what Rare or Naughty Dog have to do with this. The former hasn't made a Nintendo game in a long time and the latter didn't release a new game last year. Maybe DKC:TF, Bayonetta, Smash, etc weren't even factors in Nintendo's win. Maybe it was just because they released a few great games that actually worked.

But the truth is probably that most journalists see "Super Smash Bros" and associate it with Nintendo, and simply can't be bothered to differentiate between Nintendo as a publisher and Nintendo as a developer.

It's probably due to the convoluted design of the Nintendo development divisions (which are subfractioned even further) and the fact that Nintendo has studios specially for things like sound design, User Interface and engines, which all contribute to all their projects, meaning it's never just one single studio who works on a game at Nintendo.

Just to give you a quick overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_development_teams

Simply put? Nintendo is a developer who is divided in many teams.... and not a developer who is divided in many other "developers". That´s all.

Worth pointing out is all the internal overlap of all the parts of the larger Nintendo corporation. On that note, Nintendo (the EADs) and their subsidiaries had their hands in many projects during this year. Smash, Mario Kart, Tropical Freeze, Kirby Triple Deluxe, Hyrule Warriors, and so on. So I think they earned it frankly; their quality consistency has been very high in a year of pitiful inconsistency and laziness from others.

Nintendo Magic

 I work for Cisco, however the name of my team is virtual engineering/PH+. Everytime we get good results/commendations, customer always thank CIsco. I guess thats how it works.

Nintendo has its own internal studios for making games. They develop AND publish said games.

Sony hasnt made an internal studio game for a while.

Ubisoft are just crap.....

What would qualify as an internal studio game? Very little has changed, they've only added development studios.

I guess there is the fact that Nintendo doesnt advertise its internal studio teams. It doesnt say wich division did what at startup. They hide the developers under the Nintendo banner, absorbing both good games and bad ones into the brand instead of the individual studios.

Why does the game awards does it though? Nationalism. They are perfectly aware of wich studio team did what.

Well I consider Nintendo EAD to be Sony Japan Studio.

Just checked and Japan Studio has done some vita games and other small scale games in recent years.