New Order
How the house of Mario rebuilt itself to deliver a console for the ages
How the house of Mario rebuilt t itself to deliver Nintendo Switch, h, a console for the ages
Look, you don’t get to live to 25 without getting a few things wrong. Everyone that knows Edge has their own personal axe to grind with it, and while we’ll happily set you straight on that Doom review, the
Double Dash score or whatever else you bear a grudge over, we’re happy – delighted, actually – to admit that we were wrong about Switch.
Nintendo unveiled its new console at a series of events around the world in January 2017, and the mood among the hacks assembled at the Hammersmith Apollo that day was dour. There was much to like about this mad little thing that sought to unite Nintendo’s home-console and handheld divisions in a single system. What we found was a console that was overpriced, whose swollen feature set meant it had no clear value proposition, and a “miserably barren” launch line-up. “The resulting impression,” we wrote in E303, “is of a console that, by offering so much, has been forced into a series of compromises.” Oops.
In our defence, we weren’t alone, and what should have been a raucous coming-out party was instead seen as a wake. Media and players around the world put the boot in, and Nintendo’s stock ended the day down by six per cent. Fast forward to today, however, and Nintendo has been proven right. Switch launched in March and by the end of the year had already racked up two Edge 10s – the first console ever to do so in its first 12 months – and surpassed Wii U’s lifetime sales figures. By the end of this September, sales were approaching 23 million, and Nintendo had posted its best quarterly results in almost a decade. Its stock price has doubled since Switch launched (though it has tailed off significantly in recent months, after investors realised, with some shock, that they shouldn’t expect a one-two punch like BOTW and Odyssey every year). Three-and-a-half years after Satoru Iwata’s sudden death left a company reeling, Nintendo’s fortunes have been transformed.
Many tech companies, buoyed by such success, would come out swinging. But Nintendo doesn’t really work like that. Yoshiaki Koizumi, the deputy general manager of Nintendo’s Entertainment and Planning Division (EPD) who was general producer of the Switch project, is modest in the extreme about it all. He simply sees the console’s success as a plan that came off. “When we first conceived of Switch internally, we really wanted to create a console that would appeal to a wide variety of people who play games,” he tells us. “It’s been really gratifying to see all kinds of people enjoying it – some of them playing games for the first time, and having fun playing together in new ways.”
His boss, EPD general manager Shinya Takahashi, goes a little further. “Before Switch released, I was asked in interviews how I would judge whether it was a success. Back then I answered that, since Wii and Nintendo DS were enjoyed by quite a wide range of people, I would like to make the same happen for Nintendo Switch as well. This goal has not changed since then. Since release, we’ve steadily made progress towards it, but there are still some people that are yet to try out Switch. We want to continue communicating the unique things that make Nintendo Switch special.”
But this was not simply a matter of a company deciding to make a different type of console, and doing it. Nintendo has changed significantly since Iwata was replaced by Tatsumi Kimishima, the former company CFO (Kimishima, whose appointment was only ever meant to be transitional, stood down earlier in June, replaced by Shuntaro Furukawa). In September 2015 Nintendo announced a companywide restructure of which the headline element was the merger of its two main development teams. Entertainment Analysis and Development, or EAD, was combined with Software Planning and Development, or SPD, to form Entertainment Planning and Development. EPD would be a one-stop shop for every Nintendo game, whether for a handheld, a home console or a smartphone. It also marshalls the company’s sprawling IP portfolio.
A similar move was made on the hardware side, unifying the two teams previously responsible for hardware development and system software. But it’s the unification of the game teams that’s made the more obvious difference. With Switch, a hybrid of handheld and home console, in the works, Nintendo had no need for two teams working on different kinds of games. While 3DS would still be supported, Switch was the clear focus. And a new type of console required a fresh approach to game development.
“It certainly had an influence,” Takahashi says of the restructure. “But that influence was not limited only to the team members who are directly involved in game development. The merger also created an environment that facilitated information sharing among producers, as well as conversations among various leaders, including Mr Koizumi and myself.
“Was it difficult? Well, it’s different organisations merging, so it’s about how both sides can accept each other’s different cultures. There were challenges similar to a marriage, if that makes sense [laughs].”
One of the principal goals in the formation of EPD was to improve how Nintendo allocates its resources. The fanbase die-hards who stuck with the company through the Wii U era had to endure some miserably long waits between firstparty releases, and while it was a problem throughout Wii U’s lifespan, its roots can be traced back to before the console even launched. Unprepared for the extra development time that full-HD games required, Nintendo had to pull staff from other game teams to ensure Wii U’s launch line-up was ready on time. That meant that projects planned to ship later in the console’s life were pushed back. Wii U never really recovered.
Nintendo, however, has. “Thanks to the merging of our software development teams,” Koizumi says, “we are now more able to flexibly assign developers, based on the progress of each project.” Standards of communication have improved too, he says, both within and without the company, and across borders, in a drive to ensure new Switch games are released globally at the same time.
For once, however, Nintendo’s is not the only side of the story that matters. Yes, Switch’s firstparty line-up is stellar – not just Breath Of The Wild and Odyssey, but also the likes of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Splatoon 2 and the criminally overlooked Arms. Even the fallow days of Wii U have helped, in a way, with Nintendo able to pad out the Switch software schedule with expanded ports of the console’s firstparty games such as Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and the forthcoming New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe. But Switch’s success is about more than just Nintendo. In broader software terms this is the best-supported Nintendo console since the N64 days.
This did not happen by accident. Executives realised that the lack of thirdparty support, which had dogged Nintendo systems ever since the Gamecube, needed to be addressed. Thirdparties had found Wii U a pig to develop for: not only was it underpowered for its day, it also had a cumbersome toolchain, poor documentation and lengthy compile times. Off-theshelf engines weren’t the answer either: some reports claimed Unreal Engine 3, the dominant thirdparty engine on Xbox 360 and PS3, was never fully supported by Wii U’s architecture, and Tomonobu Itagaki’s team at Valhalla Studios had to work extensively on the source code to get it working in
Devil’s Third. Unreal Engine 4 launched early in 2014; Wii U, barely 18 months old, was not supported. Unity implementation was better, but did little to combat the perception that Nintendo simply hadn’t properly considered the needs of thirdparties.
“From the initial development phase,” Koizumi says, “it was always our intention to create a platform that would make it easy for thirdparty developers to produce games. We prepared development tools such as Unreal Engine 4 and Unity, and spoke to a lot of thirdparty developers and publishers about Nintendo Switch itself, as well as its possibilities.”
The result has been remarkable, at least by Nintendo’s standards. While Switch is not yet on the level of PS4 or Xbox One in terms of new thirdparty games, it’s become home to a number of contemporary classics. While often cut down in technical terms, the promise of a Skyrim, Dark Souls,
Doom or Diablo III in your work bag has come to form an irresistible part of the Switch value proposition. And new games will come. Publishers have learned to adopt a wait-and-see policy when it comes to Nintendo hardware; they know that early adopters are primarily interested in those worldbeating firstparty games, and historically thirdparty sales have struggled on Nintendo platforms. Off the back of Switch’s success, those attitudes are changing. The likes of Resident Evil VII and Assassin’s
Creed Odyssey have been released in Japan, though they’re only playable over an internet connection, the game files streamed from the cloud. More will follow, and sources indicate that things will soon change on the shop shelf as well.
THIRDPARTY SALES HAVE STRUGGLED ON NINTENDO PLATFORMS. OFF THE BACK OF SWITCH’S SUCCESS, ATTITUDES ARE CHANGING
“IT WAS ALWAYS OUR INTENTION TO CREATE A PLATFORM THAT WOULD MAKE IT EASY FOR THIRDPARTY DEVELOPERS TO PRODUCE GAMES”
One of the most surprising supporters of Switch is Bethesda Softworks. For 30 years, the US publisher was an almost complete stranger to Nintendo; Wayne
Gretzky Hockey and a Terminator tie-in launched for NES, but that was pretty much it. Yet it has been a vital part of Switch’s success, its conversions of Doom,
Skyrim and MachineGames’ Wolfenstein titles helping reverse the trend of Nintendo systems being seen as home to Nintendo games, and little else of note.
Takahashi fondly remembers the first time he showed a prototype of Switch to Bethesda staff. “The opportunity wasn’t something exclusive to Bethesda – we actually met with quite a few publishers to introduce them all to Switch. We gave them a demonstration of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, explaining how it was super easy to share Joy-Con with other people, and how you could remove Switch from the dock and carry on playing outside. We had them play a prototype of 1-2 Switch, too. I watched them having so much fun playing – even though it was so early in the morning! – and felt they really had understood the appeal.”
The real jewel in Switch’s thirdparty-publisher crown, however, is Ubisoft. The French company has enjoyed a fruitful relationship with Nintendo over the years, and its yield on Switch has been even better. One of the biggest of the many recent changes in the Kyoto company’s business model is a loosening of the previously vice-like grip it had on its IP portfolio. DeNA, the Japanese mobile-gaming titan that has been charged with bringing Nintendo characters to smartphones, has certainly profited from this. But Ubisoft has gone a step further, developing games for Nintendo platforms using Nintendo characters, an honour previously limited to secondparty subsidiaries such as Retro Studios. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom
Battle was a triumph, and Nintendo also loaned Ubisoft the Star Fox crew for its recently released toys-to-life space opera Starlink: Battle For Atlas. Ubisoft’s core focus on sprawling, systemic open worlds means it is unlikely to ever go all-in on Switch, but no western publisher has had a greater hand in the system’s early success.
This is not solely a story of big multinational companies, however. During the course of its 18 months on shelves Switch has established itself as a natural home for indie games. On the move, it has seamlessly filled the void left by the sad, slow death of PlayStation Vita; at home its detachable Joy-Cons
make it a perfect fit for couch multiplayer games. In both instances its modest processing power compared to PS4 and Xbox One is still perfectly capable of playing all but the most ambitious of the current crop of indie games. And, like Bethesda and Nintendo itself have shown, a game’s age is no barrier to entry. Switch is slowly becoming a repository for classic indie games of all eras.
It reflects a dramatic change in Nintendo’s attitude towards indies, for all the company’s attempts to downplay it. Koizumi points out that Nintendo was “working with indie developers before the release of Switch, during the Wii U era” – but developing for the strange dual-screen console was only possible with a dedicated devkit. In 2011, Nintendo Of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé famously proclaimed the company’s lack of interest in working with “garage” developers; at the time, small shops couldn’t get a development agreement from Nintendo without a proper business address. Even at the time, it felt like old-fashioned thinking. Soon, it would seem positively archaic. Now, clearly, it is ancient history.
“We’ve seen so many indie games from talented developers release for Nintendo Switch,” Koizumi says. “It goes without saying that the fact that we prepared development environments that make it easier for indie developers, such as Unreal Engine 4 and Unity, contributed. There are also many titles using Game Maker Studio being released lately.”
Takahashi, meanwhile, points to the way in which Nintendo has thrown its own marketing muscle behind the indie scene through regular dedicated Direct broadcasts. The most recent, in August, speaks to the breadth and depth of Switch’s catalogue of independent games: from original XBLA darling Bastion to the brilliant Undertale, smartphone classic
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP to the forthcoming Samurai Gunn 2, and plenty more besides. “We’ve also worked to make high-quality indie games more widely available,” Takahashi says, “by producing cards with download codes for retailers to sell. These sorts of efforts are helping consumers to more easily find interesting games that they perhaps wouldn’t have otherwise encountered.”
That sort of thing is vital given the size of Switch’s game library. In a little over 18 months the catalogue has passed 1,000 titles, the agonising trickle of the Wii U era replaced with an absolute flood. It is that, perhaps more than any other single element, that most plainly displays the turnaround in fortunes that Switch has wrought. As the cliché has it, a console is only as good as its games. Switch has plenty, and while Nintendo’s internally developed games remain the headline acts, they haven’t been this well supported further down the bill since the halcyon days of the Super NES.
Koizumi was around back then: his first project after joining Nintendo was designing and writing the manual for A Link To The Past. Takahashi was already there, joining in 1989 when the company was firing on every cylinder, buoyed by the success of NES.
“Back then, NES was doing great and people were very enthusiastic about it,” Takahashi says. “The Nintendo office was so lively and full of excitement. Now it’s just like that era again: the company is full of that excitement once more.”
Switch has a way to go before it can be considered an equal of the defining home console, but it’s certainly off to a flying start. With Nintendo’s house in order following a sweeping restructure, thirdparties fully on board, indies flocking to Switch in droves and, of course, two Edge 10s under its belt already, Nintendo seems in ruder, more sustainable health than it has since its halcyon early days in the videogame business. That messy London launch event already feels like a lifetime ago.
“BACK [IN THE ‘80S], THE NINTENDO OFFICE WAS SO LIVELY AND FULL OF EXCITEMENT. NOW IT’S JUST LIKE THAT ERA AGAIN”