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Nintendo hints at longer development times and new acquisitions-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro
As Xbox struggles to cope with the difficulties of modern game development, Nintendo has commented on how it may have to change as well.
Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom – how long would a next gen Zelda take to make? (Nintendo)
As Xbox struggles to cope with the difficulties of modern game development, Nintendo has commented on how it may have to change as well.
During Xbox’s current crisis, in which it has closed three development studios, cutting hundreds of jobs (with even more expected to go in the near future), their actions have been compared to Nintendo and other Japanese publishers, none of which have announced any layoffs at all in the last few years.
However, they are subject to the exact same pressures as Western companies and while Japanese games tend to have lower budgets, they still increase every generation, even if by a lesser amount. If, as assumed, the Nintendo Switch 2 is more powerful than the current model that will inevitably mean that Nintendo will have to spend more time and money making games for it.
Rather than avoiding the problems currently being highlighted by Microsoft, Nintendo may only be delaying them, with president Shuntaro Furukawa warning that, ‘it is inevitable that game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated in the future.’
Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom already took six years to make and that was despite being able to use Breath Of The Wild as a starting foundation.
The biggest budget Western games can take anything up to eight years to make now, but it may not be long until Nintendo finds itself in the same position – with all the problems that brings.
Furukawa was taking part in a Q&A session following Nintendo’s latest financial results and most of the questions where about the Switch 2 – all of which he avoided answering (except one about Nintendo Accounts, which he reiterated would carry over onto the new console, once again implying full backwards compatibility).
Discussing the increasing amount of time and money needed to make new games, he suggested that ‘M&A [mergers and acquisitions] may be considered as a means to deal with this’.
He gave no hint of what companies he might be interested in though and implied that nothing was currently planned in the short term.
‘The company’s basic policy is to work with developers who understand the brand and have built the company’s brand over the years to develop human resources who will be responsible for Nintendo’s future development,’ he said, according to Famitsu via Google Translate.
Other publishers, such as EA, have suggested that AI could be used to decrease development times but Furukawa made no mention of that.
Despite what might have been imagined he also didn’t talk about the problem in terms of avoiding it – by keeping budgets low – but instead managing the problem with new production techniques.
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Although they are one of the most valuable companies in Japan, Nintendo has traditionally never been very interested in acquisitions and has made very few during its long history, and even then only for medium-sized studios such as Monolith Soft and Next Level Games.
Despite being well known for their own franchises these have often ended up helping out with larger Nintendo projects, such as Monolith Soft working on their Xenoblade Chronicles games but also being key in the development of the modern Zelda titles.
It is that sort of arrangement that Furukawa seems to be implying for future acquisitions, making it difficult to tell exactly how significant a change in its processes Nintendo is contemplating.
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