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megameter | 4 years ago

Nintendo has a different core business model, one which is hard to replicate in another public corporation because it goes against the norm of making the quarterly results look as good as possible: Instead of scoring a hit and immediately trying to line up out yearly sequels, or trying to greenlight productions based on a marketing pitch alone, Nintendo typically rotates out IPs to match with prototypes and marketing concepts that have been on the go for a while. Likewise, they tend not to go the route of filling the shelves with a checklisted set of SKUs(e.g. 1 action, 1 RPG, 1 sports game per business quarter) - they will jump on some trends and occasionally dabble in clones and sequels, but their bread and butter has come from a more gradual approach of making each product focused, coherent and unique versus making it incrementally better than a competitor.

Ubisoft - and most of the publishers - can't do this because they're set up to make games that are large in scope, boast technical excellence(an ever-increasing bar) and are destined to be yearly franchises: quantities of assets and features are given precedence over coherence, which means that you get a trail of papercut discontinuities, dropped balls and lack of focus throughout the experience. Coherence has a degree of power over the game experience that is probably hundreds or thousands of times that of scope alone: it means that the software, assets and design work well together instead of creating "door problems" that dev time is spent solving. This means that a game built around a design that coheres well is automatically more polished since it never had to compromise the experience to solve problems. Nintendo regularly takes design shortcuts to this end, omitting entire categories of assets.

The true polar opposite to a Nintendo-style approach is something more like Bethesda's open world games: the game that's launched is a simulation engine with a large sandbox scenario. It may work and be playable to completion by itself, but the underlying product focus is to use it in a way supportive of tinkering, modding and exploitative gaming - to let the player bring a complicated system "off the rails". This tendency towards simulationism goes all the way back to Bethesda's origins in making stat-heavy sports sims. It makes for a less immediately digestible product, but one that can garner a devoted fanbase because it promises to give you most of the scope of a certain kind of role-playing fantasy, and then you can mod in the last little bit that will make that fantasy complete. So they don't have to worry so much about making it cohere, because the player is using it as a design tool.

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