Topic: Nintendo: Universal Game Developer

[Big_Pimp]

Im sure all of you have heard about the new Tokyo based R&D studio.  What if Nintendo slowly started creating new development houses?  Think of the possibilities, one to make bad ass FPSs, another to develop sports games ala Sega, and others to create more "mature" titles to silence all the none believers.  So far so good, they got Game Developers Studios making RPGs, Silicon Knights making...uh...Eternal Darknessesque games,etc.,

[iamtheearth]

I admit it would be cool to have a number of seperate dev houses, each one for a different style of game, but that would mean that the games spawned by these houses would become to formulaic, and by the book. The best thing about dev houses that have a diverse range of game styles is that each style influences the other, and so you get games that mix all the elements together and become unique and memorable for that reason

[Gamefreak]

Well EAD alone employs about 1000 people and have developed everything from all types of racing games (inventing 2 of the most popular genres - kart and futuristic, they also pioneered motocross and jet ski), adventure games, platform games, strategy games, shooters, sports games, to whatever.
Then you got HAL Labs which makes great multiplayer based based games that are super addictive...
Game Freak, Game Designers Studio, and Camelot making RPG's
Intelligent Systems doing everything from strategy to action to RPG's
Silicon Knights doing mature adventure games
Retro Studios on action/adventure, although they could come up with pretty much anything by what it seems like...
NST on weird american racing/sports type games such as Wave Race and 1080
Zoonami working on some secret game....

And not really part of, owned by, or bound to Nintendo, but faithful to Nintendo, you got dudes like Factor 5, Sonic Team, and others....and Nintendo, although not believing in buying out companies (cough, didn't they buy Silicon Knights, Retro, and Intelligent Systems cough), they seem pretty content on handing a game over to any studio they like (from Amusement Vision to Namco) and publishing the title. So while they really only have 6 "first parties", or the dudes owned and operated by Nintendo or whatever you call them (Retro, NST, IntSys, HAL, EAD, Silicon Knights), they actually have a huge range of developers to choose from for any game they want to make. As long as Nintendo is publishing, what difference does it make?

I don't think they really need any genre-specific studios. Waste of time, money, and effort when you have so many teams to choose from...

[ThePerm]

intelligent systems was always a first party...it used to be called research and development 1..while ead used to be like 2 and 4. No one ever said nintendo bought silicon knights...though Mr. Dyack kinda hinted at it when he said their situation was permanent.

[Gamefreak]

Nintendo bought the majority stake in the company back around 2000, that's fact. As for what happened afterwards, Nintendo probably bought the rest of them.

Intelligent Systems was not always first party. Here's the story:

Back in the early days, Nintendo had four R&D's:
R&D1 - still R&D1
R&D2 - hardware and stuff
R&D3 - hardware and stuff
R&D4 - EAD

R&D4 was and still is the only one that makes games and only games. They were renamed EAD at some poing. As for R&D1, this is what happened. A bunch of people from R&D1 left the group and started a company called Intelligent Systems. So now R&D1 was split into the old one and the new one. Nintendo promptly bought Intelligent Systems...so basically R&D1 just split into R&D1 and IntSys, BUT, they didn't turn into IntSys. Same is true for HAL Labs. They weren't first party to begin with. They were third party until they got closer and closer to Nintendo until Nintendo gobbled them up and relocated them to a Nintendo building. NST was created as "Nintendo of America's EAD", Retro was paid attention to as soon as they formed and promptly taken command of and then bought, and Silicon Knights was made a second party around 2000 for their impressive work on ED. I guess you can consider them second party, but I doubt they are going anywhere and Nintendo might own 100% of the shares by now - Niether company is willing to tell....sort of odd...Anyway, Nintendo owned a minority share of Rare, and didn't have complete control. Nintendo has complete controle over the above 6 developers, so they are pretty much first party or whatever you want to call them...

[Termin8Anakin]

Hey Perm, I totally agree with you on your sig.