According to Nintendo, as development costs for videogames have grown significantly due to the projects being larger and more ambitious than ever before coupled with higher technical demands, all of that have turned game developments into an even riskier venture in the current era of gaming. And one of the effective ways to balance this out is to shorten the overall development periods, said Nintendo boss Shuntaro Furukawaka in a recently translated Nintendo investor Q&A. Of course, the rising costs of game development could be offset by increasing the prices of games, but that could have negative effects on the player base which would limit the number of people willing to pay the extra price.
“Recent game software development has become larger in scale and longer in duration, resulting in higher development costs,” Furukawa stated. “The game business has always been a high-risk business, and we recognize that rising development costs are increasing that risk.”
Furukawa said that Nintendo as a company is aware of the standard in terms of development and novelty it embodies in it’s games and it strives to maintain all of those values as the industry moves forward.
“Our development teams are devising various ways to maintain our traditional approach to creating games amidst the increasing scale and length of development,” Furukawa continued. “We believe it is important to make the necessary investments for more efficient development.”
Then he suggested that one of the ways the company can maintain it’s economic balance is to limit the time period of it’s development projects.
“We also believe it is possible to develop game software with shorter development periods that still offer consumers a sense of novelty,” Furukawa concluded, without providing an example of this. “We see this as one potential solution to the concern about rising development costs and software prices, and we will explore it from various angles within the company.”
And while his suggestion makes a lot of sense, we’ll see how Nintendo incorporates them in terms of development with it’s range of games.