Nintendo Wants To Keep 'Traditional Approach' To Development as Costs Skyrocket

Nintendo plans to maintain its "traditional approach" to game development while managing rising costs during the Switch 2 transition, company president Shuntaro Furukawa said during a recent shareholders meeting.

"Recent game software development has become larger in scale and longer in duration, resulting in higher development costs," he said, adding that "rising development costs are increasing that risk" in what has always been "a high-risk business."

Nintendo's development teams are "currently devising various ways to maintain our traditional approach to creating games amidst the increasing scale and length of development," Furukawa said. The company believes, he said, "it is important to make the necessary investments for more efficient development."

The early Switch 2 lineup reflects increased ambition, with Mario Kart World introducing open-world structure to the racing series and Donkey Kong Bananza adding destructive elements to 3D platforming. Mario Kart World sells for $79.99, $10 more than most Nintendo games, while the Switch 2 costs $449.99, a $100 increase over the Switch OLED.

You get to pick how much you invest in the game

[Z80a]

Unless some external force want you to use more money because it increase some value, even if you don't even have how to use the extra budget in a realistic way.

Re:You get to pick how much you invest in the game

[rsilvergun]

Not really. Modern video games required complex pixel shaders to achieve the look they want. Nintendo games especially have a tough time because they need to be bright and colorful and full of pizzazz. You can't just use off the shelf pixel shaders like you can with a unreal engine game.

I mean you can but everything will look like fortnite. Which isn't to say that fortnite is a ugly game, but it's a very specific style and if you copy it by using those default pixel shaders your game is going to look cheap.

This is a problem Japanese game studios have had for a long time. Going all the way back to Sonic boom where Sega tried to use the Cysis engine on the Wii u to disastrous results.

It's just plain hard to make games look like the kind of fun bright colorful Japanese games the Japanese game players expect and want. That means you've got a lot of people doing a lot of work a lot of which doesn't directly pay off.

And make matters worse they have to write for a underpowered system relatives of the ps5. The switch 2 is roughly equivalent to a PS4 pro. Which is a amazing technical feat in that form factor but it means that you're going to have to put a lot more work into your optimizations to make the games look like people expect.

If you want to see what happens when you don't have the money for that work look at Mario tennis or Star Fox on the Wii u. Both complete disasters.

Re:You get to pick how much you invest in the game

[locater16]

Pretty graphics don't cost much, there's two people indie dev teams getting praised for making great looking games [youtube.com].

What costs money in games is a lot of unique art, and scrapping your entire game to start it over a lot. A Call of Duty campaign costs a lot of money for 5 hours because every level is both unique and filled with a ton of unique assets and has detailed motion capture from professional actors and a professional orchestral soundtrack and every last gun has a unique sound design and etc. etc. And on top of it all it kinda looks like crap because it's stuck still making games for consoles over a decade old now.

As for scrapping your game over and over and over, that's a hilarious habit of modern western developers that all get fired eventually. Ubisoft spent a decade making a pirate live service game called Skull and Bones that flopped because the company is run like dogshit. "Concord" is another one that cost over a hundred million, and was so generic and unspecial it was killed in less than a month.

"Pretty" isn't expensive in games. But tailor made mass market monopolies and "stupid" certainly are.

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[rsilvergun]

True but that's a pretty simple game gameplay wise. If you're trying to make a fast action game like Mario kart I think it would be much harder to achieve what that game does.

That isn't to take away from those developers accomplishments, the game looks very nice for something two people made. But I don't think those guys could make Mario kart world. And keep in mind Mario kart world has a lot less content than you would expect. It has fewer tracks than the last Sonic the hedgehog kart racer...

It's j

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[luther349]

then some Indy title hits without all that nonsense and good gameplay and sells like crazy. these company's do it to themselves and nobody should feel sorry for them or hand hem 80$ for a game.

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[rsilvergun]

I've got mixed feelings about the high price point. On the one hand I know that these companies make plenty of money without the high price point and are just soaking their fans.

On the other hand if you have a game people are going to be playing for years to come then it's not like $80 is a lot of money. If I'm going to put 50 or 60 hours into your game and enjoy it without it feeling like it's padded then I'm probably coming out okay. Although I still would be feeling a lot better if the game was $60.

Thank fuck for Asia

[locater16]

The west has gone and fucked itself right up the jacksie by ensuring the salesmen are in charge rather than people actually making the products. Salesmen want the biggest numbers, and since money is the only language they speak they assume that by spending more they can earn more. Thus every western game studio is ordered to spend more more more until 9/10 studios fail and everyone is fired, but by god that 1/10 are going to make so much money maybe so gamble today!

Meanwhile Japan and now China of all places has let people that actually make products be in charge of making products and has proven more consistently successful than the wests all or nothing billionaire high. While Microsoft commits accounting fraud over Gamepass and fires half its gaming division Nintendo remains at a net 25% profit margin and Sony has fired its brief experiment with a western crackhead CEO schilling "live service" titles and gone back to trying to consistently make money by producing products people reliably want.

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[jacks smirking reven]

This is pretty true but let's not leave the consumers fair share of the blame out of this as well, there's a reason we're here talking about Epic and it's because Fortnite continues to make eleventy gazillion dollars a year along with Roblox, Valorant, League and various other live service titles. Developers market towards these areas because they tend to pay off, a couple notable bombs notwithstanding.

Does that necessarily make it good business or good games? Of course not but it's not just some maliciou

Mario Kart...

[sarren1901]

I've always loved Mario Kart. Having started out on the original Super Nintendo's Super Mario Kart, I felt everything afterwards was just easier. I was so disappointed when I got to Rainbow Road on the N64 and it had guard rails and was nearly impossible to fall off the track. Original Rainbow road had zero boarders and a power sliders dream it was! Definitely the gold standard for a race track.

With that said, I've always found it really frustrating how not only does Mario Kart cost a fortune but it almost never goes down much in price. You can wait years and the game will still be sitting there at full retail. Like, really! I never did buy a Switch and that was part of the reason.

I get with inflation, $80 is cheaper then the $60 I paid 20 years ago but grr.

I might pickup a Switch 2, but only to pickup the latest Madden game (rather not buy the latest Xbox to get the latest Madden), but I may just wait another year. Laugh if you want, but if the Denver Broncos go to the Superbowl, I'll buy the new console so I can have THAT roaster. We all got our wasteful hobbies, but I'll play the shit out of the game making it worth every penny.

Re:Mario Kart...

[jacks smirking reven]

This phenonemon has it's own slang term, the "Nintendo Tax" since Nintendo has complete control over their store so sales are rarely more than 10-20% on any titles, not even just first-party Nintendo titles. Even on the switch since the digital copies rarely go down in price there's no pressure on the used market for the physical carts either so they stay high in price and Nintendo titles are in high demand as well.

At this point since so many have aped the Switch form factor it really is those exclusives like Mario Kart and Zelda and such that keeps Nintendo in the game so in regards to this story they are rightfully conservative about changing their development process, it's really the only thing left keeping that ship afloat, if the quality tanks I imagine Nintendo goes with it.

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[rsmith-mac]

I've always loathed the term "Nintendo Tax" because it implies some kind of penalty, like a wealth tax or a vice tax. Though I can't argue that it's not a real thing - Nintendo's best games hold their market value far better than rival games, even from other top-tier Japanese developers.

Still, I would approach this phenomena from the other direction. Nintendo is not able to maintain high prices because they're somehow fleecing people (as a tax would imply), but because they work to make games that stand the

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[sarren1901]

Like I said, I did not buy the Switch and this one was on the reasons why. I instead got a refurbished XBox One. It's been great and I've got many games super cheap off the bargain resell rack at Game Stop. Also bought Madden 23 and apparently that's the last version for the Xbox One. Not really ready for a new system but wouldn't mind a new madden for the roster (Yes, I realize it's silly, but my team is doing well and it's part of the fun to see THOSE players).

I'll probably just wait on it unless my team

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[sarren1901]

And apparently I can get Madden 25 for the Xbox one, which is close enough to this years roster, so now I'll just wait for that title to drop in price and avoid the whole new system altogether!

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[jacks smirking reven]

Taxes are not punishment and it's silly to view them that way.

No, it's impossible to say the premium price Nintendo maintains is totally due to quality and not scarcity, it's scarcity. Steam is full of great all time titles, some right up there with Nintendo's best but PC games are commodities and that's what Nintendo has been able to avoid, becoming just a dev shop.

Lots of companies don't want to devalue their games but big Ma control of their own market absolutely helps a ton in that effort

PS3 was 19 yea

Yet they're increasing game prices to $80?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're maintaining the same methods of development, they should also stick to the same prices.

If they feel forced to adjust their prices, they should instead find ways to scale back on the cost of development and keep the same prices. They are pricing people out. There is no way that parents are going to replace what was $150-$200 Switch Lite hardware (before Nintendo's recent price hikes on last gen hardware and accessories) and $55-$60 Switch 1 games with what is now $450 hardware and $80 games.

bs

[blackomegax]

The switch 2 can run, at best, PS4(base) level graphics. That means your development costs can be cheap/AA since your graphics target is 1-2 generations behind (mariokart world is basically a 360-era graphics title with slightly better textures and DLSS higher res.)

High dev costs are in the truly ps5 era graphics tier where you need 16 layer PBR textures and 100,000 polygon assets everywhere and raytracing. Switch 2 can run none of that nor does it need to. (yes it has "RT" cores but you'd get, maybe 10-12fps if you turned RT on with that tiny tiny ampere GPU that's basically half as powerful as a 2050 mobile.)

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[Z80a]

It is a bit better than the PS4 because it has more memory, SSD, and a CPU that is twice as fast.
But those will in most cases just reduce the productions cost as you don't have to screw around with data streaming or a really slow CPU.

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[blackomegax]

The CPU is not twice as fast. A78C cores are marginally better than the jaguar cores but nintendo clocks them at 1ghz and only lets devs access 5 of them (as opposed to 7, that the ps4 allowed devs to use). I'd call it a draw, and current ports bear that out (cyberpunk can't even lock 40fps in its 40fps mode). A couple gigs more memory doesn't matter all that much, and the SSD isn't PS5 class and still has dog slow decompression thanks to those 1ghz cpu cores.

Re:bs

[Z80a]

It's not marginally, it's literally twice the number of simultaneous instructions per cycle, with better branch prediction and all that.
I recommend you check the digitalfoundry video on the switch 2 version of cyberpunk, it is quite drastic the difference of CPU performance and storage performance from the PS4, at a point the switch 2 can (barely) run the phantom liberty DLC while it's impossible to do it on the PS4.
The only part where the PS4 wins is on shadow quality because the PS4 has more GPU power.
Also we're comparing the PS4 storage versus the switch 2, a mechanical hard drive that barely can hit 100MB/s on a good day and has seektimes, while the switch 2 has a "paltry" 1GB/s storage with no seek time.

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[sound+vision]

That was my first thought: What is their "traditional approach" to development, and why is it having a problem?

I would expect to have read a headline like, "Nintendo margins soar as studio skips on animators and actors."

Is (for example) raytracing so expensive, and so critical to a Mario game, that they're having to spend big bucks on it? Which tech is it, then? Or are the costs all in overhead?

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[rsilvergun]

I think you end up with the opposite. People still expect the switch to compete favorably. Especially when they're dropping $500 on the console. So they're going to expect AAA graphics. Maybe not up to the level of the absolute best on the PlayStation 5 but pretty damn close and the weaker hardware means you're going to have to do a lot more work in order to close that gap.

From what I've read the switch 2 is closer to a PS4 pro but still. Even with the ability to occasionally write to bare metal you're

How about some new fucking games?!

[registrations_suck]

Still peddling Mario and Donkey Kong after all these many, many, many years.

How about some NEW fucking game ideas?

Thanks.

powerfull than switch 1 so easier to dev ?

[Matthieu Araman]

I dont get their argument except as trying to justify price increases to shareholders. As the console is more powerfull and more closer to the rest of market, developers will have to spend less time on tweaking to fit on undersize hardware as they had to do on switch1. So this should be easier, not to say a dev a game is a easy thing. Hope these saving are spent to dev better games.