Nintendo battling rising development costs with creativity, says Shigeru Miyamoto

Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto Demonstrates the company’s belief that unique creativity is more important than development costs.

Discuss the recent rise in game development costs Investor Q&AMiyamoto acknowledged that the company’s development expenses have increased year by year. “As our development scale expands, a corresponding increase in costs is inevitable in some aspects,” he said.

However, creative and interesting ideas are paramount, and other members of Nintendo’s board of directors agree.

“We keep refining our products until we’re confident we’ve created something that consumers will be happy with,” Miyamoto said. “With that in mind, it’s important to find ideas worth honing, which has been the case since the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nothing has changed since.

“Everyone’s interests are different, so we can’t generalize about what ideas are worth pursuing. However, one thing we can be sure of is that it should be something that didn’t exist in the past. For something that didn’t exist, the more you polish it, the better.” Before, it The greater the value it brings.

As such, Nintendo aims to develop developers who “keep this unique concept in mind,” allocate funds as needed and release games “only when we’re confident in the product.”

“It is possible to create attractive products based on interesting ideas without incurring large costs,” Miyamoto added.

“We believe that not all products require significant costs,” he continued. “Even in video games, with current technology, interesting games can be created by a small number of developers in a short period of time. We think it’s important not to lose sight of this perspective.”

Senior Managing Executive Officer and Company Director Shinya Takahashi commented: “I believe that by expanding on the ideas of a small number of developers, it is possible to create small but unique games worth polishing, rather than investing large amounts of money in each game. Research and development costs are rising, but expenses for certain products remain relatively stable, depending on our approach.

Senior CEO and company director Ko Shiota added that the merger of Switch’s home consoles and handheld consoles has allowed Nintendo to consolidate its development environments, which will continue switch 2.

“Because we are already familiar with the Nintendo Switch, maintaining a similar foundation of development environments in the future will allow us to build on the experience we have built, which should reduce development costs over time,” he said.

Investors’ questions follow high-profile and expensive failures last year, including “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League” From Warner Bros. and Cancel Concorde From Sony.

Meanwhile, Nintendo is preparing for the Switch 2 launch. While there are reports that its graphics performance is comparable to the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and it is capable of running Unreal Engine 5, its specifications may not be as powerful.