In 2014, Nintendo faced a financial shortfall when the Wii U was severely underperforming. To avoid layoffs, then-Nintendo President Satoru Iwata announced he would take a 50% pay reduction to avoid cutting staff. This decision saved thousands of jobs, and Nintendo employees were able to stay on to help develop their next console: the Nintendo Switch, the company’s most successful home console of all time. It’s a legendary moment in games industry history, one that highlights Nintendo’s clear-eyed approach in moments of crisis. Nearly a decade later, Nintendo’s new president Shuntaro Furukawa offers his own pragmatic solution to confront the turbulence currently roiling the games industry.
In the most recent Q&A with investors to discuss the latest quarterly financials, a concerned investor told Furukawa that they were worried the improved performance of the Nintendo Switch 2 will lead to increased development times for games, which in turn will drive up Nintendo’s development costs. This is a valid worry – increased performance unlocks the opportunity for more detailed graphics, deeper gameplay systems, and more ambitious campaign designs, all of which take longer to create. One only has to look at the 13-year wait between Grand Theft Auto 5 and Grand Theft Auto 6 to see how the shift in technology is causing games to take much, much longer to make.
But these extended timelines are not just bad for fans who have to wait a ridiculously long time for a sequel to their favorite game. As game development time stretches longer and longer, budgets climb with it. And when a game that costs hundreds of millions of dollars and takes nine years to make fails to meet its lofty financial targets, redundancies quickly follow. After the near decade-long development of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League finally came to an end in 2024, the game launched to lukewarm reviews and middling sales. Rocksteady suffered heavy layoffs as a result. The studio’s parent company, Warner Bros. Games, specifically cited the $200 million loss it took on Suicide Squad when discussing its own dire finances – a situation that led to the closure of studios like Monolith Productions.
Getting back to the concerned Nintendo investor, Furukawa responded with a plan so sensible, it’s hard to believe more video game CEOs aren’t saying the same thing.
“Recent game software development has become larger in scale and longer in duration, resulting in higher development costs,” he said. “The game business has always been a high-risk business, and we recognize that rising development costs are increasing that risk.” To mitigate this, he explained that Nintendo is “devising various ways to maintain our traditional approach to creating games amidst the increasing scale and length of development… We also believe it is possible to develop game software with shorter development periods that still offer consumers a sense of novelty.”
In short, Furukawa says that not only will Nintendo try to maintain its current development timelines, but also find ways to make possibly smaller games with shorter development times and the same level of appeal for Nintendo fans.
The question then is whether Nintendo can deliver on these two promises, especially considering that the company’s development timelines for its biggest games seem to be stretching longer as well. But while it’s still too early in the Switch 2 era to know for sure, there are positive signs from across Nintendo’s history.
As I’ve already noted, Nintendo is very much not immune to lengthy development timelines. Each new mainline Legend of Zelda game takes longer to create than the last. It took six years for Nintendo to follow up Breath of the Wild with Tears of the Kingdom. Meanwhile, everyone is still waiting for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, due to release later in 2025, eight years after it was announced.
But Furukawa probably wasn’t talking about major Zelda and Metroid releases when he floated the idea of making smaller games with shorter development times. Instead, he’s likely referring to games like Mario Party, which might not have the big-name appeal of mainline Zelda but is no less important to Nintendo. Don’t believe me? Consider for a moment that last year’s Mario Party Jamboree sold 21.16 million units. That’s only 570,000 fewer than The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s 21.73 million. Furthermore, Nintendo has released a Mario Party game consistently every three years since 2012’s Mario Party 9.
Mario Party’s continued success is helped by Nintendo’s unique advantage of having a stable of highly flexible mascot characters. Mario can headline his trademark blockbuster 3D platformers, while also starring in a party game series, or whatever sports game he and his friends decide to headline in any given year. The everyman Italian plumber is a veritable chameleon who can star in whatever game Nintendo needs him to, boosting all kinds of mid-size games with his superstar power.
Thankfully for Nintendo, this shape-shifting isn’t just limited to Mario. Link, too, is no stranger to filling in the gaps between his own mainline games with stints in smaller adventures. Games like The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Spirit Tracks, A Link Between Worlds, and Link’s Awakening keep fans pleasantly occupied between games like Skyward Sword and Tears of the Kingdom. Count these games, and suddenly The Legend of Zelda’s release cadence begins to resemble Mario Party’s, with a Link-starring adventure arriving every three or so years.
In games like Mario Party Jamboree and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and countless other smaller Nintendo first-party games, there’s an established blueprint to keep the Switch 2 healthy and replete with games for years to come, especially if Nintendo can come close to matching the publishing output it had during the Switch 1 era. While it’s easy to overlook now, Nintendo’s publishing calendar throughout the Switch 1 generation was no joke.
In 2024, Sony Interactive Entertainment published nine games. Xbox Game Studios published just six games — or nine, if you include ports to other consoles. Meanwhile, Nintendo published 12 games in the final year of the Switch. As you can see in the chart below, Nintendo’s publishing output has typically held the lead against Xbox and PlayStation’s yearly releases. The only exception is in 2020, when Xbox rebranded all its first-party studios under the new Xbox Game Studios banner.
Maintaining a regular publishing schedule of 10 or more games is likely what helped keep the Switch relevant for as long as it did, and could be the goal Furukawa is aiming for when he talks about “developing game software with shorter development periods that still offer consumers a sense of novelty.”
To be fair, this strategy of releasing smaller games in a shorter time isn’t exclusive to Nintendo. I previously advocated for more “half-sequels,” like Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, as one solution to the industry’s swollen development pipeline. And while Kratos likely won’t star in a golf spinoff game, Sony was once quite good at releasing bite-sized games set in its most popular franchises before it made a public pivot towards live-service games. While I can’t say for sure whether this gambit paid off for Sony, the move does appear to have kicked off a chain reaction of canceled games at studios like Naughty Dog, Bend Studio, and Bluepoint.
At the time, many in the industry seemed to agree with my call for smaller games, but this idea has thus far failed to materialize in the blockbuster space. Instead, the general strategy from the heads of gaming companies appears to be fighting the ever-growing size of AAA games by incorporating more AI and offshore development to help struggling developers meet deadlines. Either that or create a live-service game so successful it can keep generating profit years after launch.
Nintendo’s Furukawa already ruled out utilizing AI for game development in a separate Q&A with investors in 2024. So if Nintendo is serious about investing in its developers, then maybe it’s not too late to give up on the dream of reigning in the excesses of the games industry towards a more manageable size. And while no game company CEO has come forward to halve their pay (yet), Nintendo is once again approaching a time of chaos with a sensible plan for its future, if it indeed follows through with it.
Matt Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.
