Isn't it just simply that EAD and EAD Tokyo and what not are seperate departments of Nintendo (not including studio's like RETRO and such) and Ubidoft Montreal for instance is a completely separate legal entity?

Agreed with op.. But i think its because there is sort of an anonymity to the generql public of who develops what at nintendo.. Is it even mentioned on the game box? I think only retro is popularly known. How can you fault them though. EAD1, EAD2 etc doesnt exactly brim with differentation

In fairness, not a bad question. I think the truth is it's too irritating to define this and where the splits ought to be, and the best idea is actually just to consider all of the collectives e.g. just Ubisoft rather than Ubisoft Montreal. In this case Nintendo still win I'd say, but it's a fairer contest, sure.

It's actually unfair for Nintendo. They get just one nomination while other companies can get a lot more as their studios are counted separate.

Nintendo is a top notch developer since they focus only on gaming. That's how.

Because if they took Ubisoft as a whole they wouldn't be nominated at all, LOL!

As for people saying Nintendo only got nominated because of EAD, that's bullshit.

Retro Studios - Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
Namco Bandai - Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS

That just doesn't make sense.. How can 3 different developers win THE dev of the year? It's not publisher of the year. It's developer.

Then both EAD, Retro and Bamco should be nominated and we would see which of the 3 studios (and others) did best in 2014 imo.

Retro is Nintendo and Nintendo were heavily involved with Smash.

Nintendo EAD should be considered one developer. Just like how Naughty Dog has 2 teams now, or Square has about 4 working internally or Capcom Japan may have 5 or 6, Nintendo EAD has about 10. Retro or Monolithsoft should be considered separate developers. But "Nintendo" is a developer internally and should be regarded as such. You don't separate EAD team 1 or 2 or 3 anymore than you would separate the Naughty Dog's teams or the FFXIV team from the FFXV team as separate developers.

And yeah, I would say on any given year they could be called "developer of the year" without much objection.