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Nintendo improves pipelines, plans more spinoffs

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Published: November 5, 2014 9:39 AM

Nintendo’s Wii U has been slow to produce many games, instead often relying on a plethora of backlog with Wii games, and a whole bunch of classic Nintendo titles. However, according to Shigeru Miyamoto at an investor Q&A that appears to be coming to an end as Nintendo has worked on their hardware issues regarding HD graphics and with greater familiarity should have better speed through the development pipeline.

Further on in that discussion was that the fact that on the back of Hyrule Warriors, Nintendo may look to create more spin off games in partnership with other developers. Working with some new partners and leveraging their big name brands, Nintendo could revitalize some of its games with adding more types of games. Many people have noted that Nintendo tends to create the same game with a few twists over and over again – and the numbering in titles of games tends to agree with that.

Hyrule Warriors is a prime example of what could be done if Nintendo gets the right partners and creates quality spin-offs with them. A game with different game play then what many of their games have that uses familiar and fun characters in different ways. Many of Nintendo’s big lines nowadays once began as spinoffs themselves way back – Mario was originally a spinoff from Donkey Kong obviously and games such as Mario Party and Mario Kart spinoff from there.

Nintendo also seems to be waking up somewhat to the fact that it can’t do everything alone. Beyond reaching out and creating partnerships with developers for the first time in some cases, they are talking with different 3rd party companies to help with things like asset creation and cut-scenes to further improve their pipeline development.

On development time, we have already completed the step of learning new development techniques. So, we should experience less developmental delays stemming from learning new hardware. From now on, it becomes a matter of if we can use our experience efficiently and one part of our plan to do so is to use 'spin off games', which allow us to use our major title franchises, but create on a smaller scale and we are working hard on making these sort of derived products. In this way, we are preparing to expand on our characters while also increasing the number of software we output and allowing our customers to have their next experiences in certain franchises without waiting three years.

We are also working more and more with many different 3rd party companies to produce our titles [note: this seems to refer to outsourcing things like asset creation, cut-scenes, etc] and from this year we have begun to work with some software developers for the very first time. We are in the process of creating a system where we are actively seeking outside assistance to help us create an abundance of major titles. I feel that next year's Wii U titles are plentiful. We will continue working hard.

Shigeru Miyamoto on pipelines and 3rd party assistance
Nintendo Direct is going on today at 5pm Eastern and is expected to talk about games being released for the rest of this year. It is possible that something from this may come up though either in expected spinoffs or why Nintendo expects more ‘significant’ releases in 2015 than there was in 2014.
Don Parsons
| Senior Writer

A longtime lover of speculative fiction, in almost all its forms, Don joined TechRaptor in 2014 on a whim sending in an application as he was looking for… More about Don