If you look at the numbers of first party games released it's about equal to those released the past 20 years on Nintendo consoles so it's about the same. Nintendo was a little stressed supporting 3DS AND a HD console. Oh and look around at every developer these days is vastly over challenged by HD development. All these AAA devs are over worked and over staffed and still we have insane delays and releases of broken games still released early despite delays. Indies like Hello Games or Comcept are clearly over challenged. Nintendo now willonly have to worry about Switch so that will help.

Point is yes Nintendo is to a degree but should be eased soon but most developers still are over challenged by HD development..hell so many of them have closed last 10 years.

Nintendo had a problem with HD througout, I would say, the first two years of the WiiU's lifecycle. They are becoming faster, but an HD game needs a lot of polish as it is, and Nintendo is extremely demanding on that front. Plus, yeah, Nintendo needs more manpower, or at the very least, more teams to make its lineup less sparce.

I have the feeling they released ALOT more 20 years ago. Just all those RARE games that were made by like 20 people as an example. But im not 100% sure.

Also the competition problems most likely started in the 8th gen development (still HD but bug increase in graphics, details, animations, world sizes and co). Nintendo is still more like the ps3/x360 HD development were the problems werent as big.

No most the issues started last gen with costs and the problems got worse over time and I don't have the sheet with me but about a year ago saw a exact number of first party games since N64 and well they were somewhere around 30-40 each and Wii U was right in there.

Which other publisher releases about a dozen games per year? (3DS included) Very few do despite having more programmers. More programmers also doesn't necessarly speed up things. In fact, it rarely does - it mostly just allows to add more things like graphical effects

The reason for the rereleases are probably because they are acclaimed games on a system which didn't sell well and because of the lack of backwards compatibilty their previous 2 consoles had. Emulating a Wii U is probably not possible on the Switch either, so the Virtual Console route also falls flat for them, too.

The numbers of programmers can also be slightly misleading, as Nintendo has some specialized studios for things like game engines or sound which are included in the total numbers in other studios but not at Nintendo

they  are massively understaffed. Nintendo tends to like to keep their offices and development teams quite small and close knit in terms of quantity of people. sure, they have some of the best software designers in the industry- BUT even having the best doesn't necessarily make up for not having the correct quantity of employees

just to put it into perspective- Ubisoft has a much much bigger overal team of developers than Nintendo. That's crazy to think.

I think the big N just needs to absorb some more teams and be open to a larger employment circle 

Indeed.

As well as consolidate to one platform like Microsoft and Sony instead of two.

Yes, and it's really their own fault. While everyone else was doing HD development and cutting their teeth on PS3 and 360, Nintendo was still doing SD on Wii. They were killing it, but at a cost. I think that's why they're using Unreal now vs. using their own proprietary engines. You're not going to tell me that the new Mario game isn't running on Unreal either, I can see the signature "unreal" rendering techniques being used in the footage.

I don't think this is the case for Zelda though. It is a HUGE game. Nintendo wants to make sure it's ready to go, bug free, day 1. They've enlisted some of the team from Monolith Soft, development itself was probably going well. But when Switch got thrown in the mix, you can only imagine how that screwed up the release schedule. Aonuma probably got wind of the Switch needing Zelda about a year ago. Then they had to adapt to switch.

There's a lot going on behind closed doors, too much for us to really speculate about. But I do still believe Nintendo is a bit more challenged than others in terms of HD development. Mainly because Iwata thought it was unnecessary and would fit a successor much better.

Do you have any sources for Nintendo using Unreal Engine rather than in-house technology now?