I realized something during today's Indie presentation for the Nintendo Switch:

-Indie devs love the Switch and have a great relationship with Nintendo;

-As reported many times in the past Nintendo provides help whenever it's needed to indie devs;

-Indie devs that work on Nintendo consoles usually make games similar to abbandoned Nintendo franchises;

This lead me to think: why hasn't Nintendo licensed one of their IPs to some good Indie team yet ? It's a win-win situation:

the game sells more because it's part of an established series;

Nintendo doesn't have to work on all of their IPs which are far too many;

Fans of said IPs get sequels to the games they love;

Indie devs don't need to put stupid mechanics in the game just to make it different from the original Nintendo IP;

In my opinion there's plenty of Indie teams out there that are skilled enough to handle properly Nintendo's less used IPs and who would love to work on said IPs, i.e. in an interview with IGN one of the directors of Yacht Club Games kast year stated they would love to do a 2D Metroid game...

Its more of a budget matter than anything else.Lets say you an indie developer borrows Metroid.Unless they make a 2D Metroid, everyone nowadays expects a game at the same size and scope of the Prime games, and thats a budget and manpower an indie developer dont have.

Even for games like F Zero that could be doable for an indie to develop, the ammount of effort into the game would be higher than in a game like Fast RMX, because they would need to make charachters(and assets for them), have some form of narrative, a campaign of some sort, etc.In other words, alot more work.Thats why I think it wouldnt work.

Well, they do kinda do this.

Next Level Games with Luigi's Mansion 2, Punch-Out, and Federation Force
Good-Feel with Kirby and Yoshi
Arzest with Yoshi
Monster Games with Pilotwings and Excite

I think a co-operative approach would be better. Inti Creates for example does a lot of amazing Sprite work, but their games aren't super memorable. I think Nintendo partnering with them for Metroid would be great.

Well Nintendo should set the budget for the games and oversee development so that it doesn't get mismanaged, that way Nintendo would earn a considerable portion of the profits as publisher of the games while Indie devs would make better games with less budget insecurities and gear up to become bigger companies

I'm talking specifically about Indie teams all of those you two nominated are established development teams with dozzens of developers

I think it's a manpower issue for the most part. I don't see why they don't lend out metroid though, and some other of their older franchises that see no use anyway. 2D metroid would be more than possible for an indie to do, and so would a new earthbound and more.

Scope, manpower and budget. Most indies don't have enough of those to make a game with the level of craft expected from a Nintendo title, unless is one of the older formats (2D Mario, Zelda, Kirby and Metroid, some Pokemon spinoff...).

Good-Feel has 93 employees and Next Level games has 79 employees. That's way too big to be considered an indie developer. 

Well, if that's the case, Indies need to stay away from Nintendo's IP.