For Nintendo, the most important thing is not the budget of a video game, but this crucial element

Gaming News For Nintendo, the most important thing is not the budget of a video game, but this crucial element

Hardware design spending: a bet made several years in advance

With the current crisis in the video game industry, one topic in particular has come to the fore again, in addition to the way studios and their employees are managed. We’re obviously talking about it Money and especially the way securities are financed that we play. The big teams point out that the development costs are very high or even that the current Triple-A model is no longer really sustainable.

The smaller structures stand out for their part the withdrawal of investors, much more cautious when it comes to putting their money into a project that cannot count on a large marketing machine. In short: developing games is very expensive and not always worth it from a financial perspective. Fortunately, production remains plentiful and more and more titles are being released. If we enlarge the line, we could say that the big productions summarize the trends and that they are on the side of the independent or more modest teams That comes from taking risks. Of course it’s not always that easy, but the question of creativity remains central.

Throughout its history Nintendo has designed its machines around some strong conceptsthat developers (especially internally) had to do this to make maximum use produce something new. From the NES, designed to find its place in a crumbling market, to the Wii and its idea of ​​bringing the whole family together around motion gaming, including the hybrid side of the SwitchThe brand often tries to differentiate itself by anticipating the expectations of an ever-evolving audience. This sometimes leads to immense success, but also failures

See Nintendo Switch OLED on Amazon

While we all expect Nintendo to follow the path set by the Switch, Ko Shiota raised the issue of expenses. We now know from numerous financial reports that the company spends a lot of money on research and development; the head of the hardware department assumes that the amounts spent are high are not enough to make things work.

I think the most important thing for Nintendo is how to generate new ideas. It’s not true that spending money on development creates great ideas. “We want to continue to focus on the process by which developers from the hardware and software teams share ideas to create interesting things,” he says after being asked about it during the tradition Exchange with investors

.

In other words, spending money (a lot of money) on hardware development is only relevant if the result is the same a good relationship between the proposed material and the creative teams. Developers must be able to exploit the peculiarities of machines or peripheral devices to derive new approaches. We therefore need to create an enabling environment for creativity, and history has shown that this is not always easy. If “Switch 2” is what we think it is, then it is rather on the side of the services offered, that the machine could take a step forward. Ultimately, it is an incentive to take risks, promotes Ko Shiota. In this context, everyone can derive whatever they want from it.