Nintendo want to shorten development cycles as the business of making games becomes riskier with ballooning development costs.
The gaming industry is currently facing several headwinds. Games are becoming increasingly more expensive to make as development cycles routinely stretch to five or more years. If a project doesn’t sell well enough it can easily sink a development studio. Nintendo, however, is looking to avoid these stumbling blocks of as it enters its Switch 2 era.
During a Q&A with shareholders, Shuntaro Furukawa, president of Nintendo, spoke of the challenges the company faces. “The game business has always been a high-risk business, and we recognize that rising development costs are increasing that risk.” Now that it has more powerful hardware available, it would be easy to fall into the trap of making sprawling worlds that are more graphically impressive.
