While latest questions and answers with investors, Nintendo executive and renowned designer Shigeru Miyamoto responded to a question about the trend of rising development costs, saying that what Nintendo creates is much more crucial than what it spends on development.
The question was about rising development costs, whether Nintendo’s own expenses would raise in the future and whether the company could mitigate these increases. Miyamoto stepped in to respond first, saying that while cost increases are inevitable and Nintendo is primarily focused on creating good and unique experiences, it is quite possible to create great games without spending huge amounts of money.
Here is his full answer:
Our research and development expenses are increasing year by year. As our scale of development has increased, a corresponding raise in costs is in some respects inevitable.
However, we believe that what we create is more crucial than the amount spent on development. We continue to refine our products until we are sure we have created something our consumers will be ecstatic with. With this in mind, it’s crucial to find ideas that are worth refining, and that hasn’t changed since the Nintendo Entertainment System era. Everyone has different interests, so we cannot make general statements about what ideas are worth pursuing. However, we are sure of one thing: it should be something that has not existed in the past. The more you refine something that has never existed before, the more value it brings. We believe it’s crucial to support developers who take this unique concept to heart, commit development resources when necessary, and only release games when we are confident in the product – and we repeat this process over and over again.
In turn, in the entertainment industry, you can create attractive products based on intriguing ideas without incurring significant costs. The best example of this are children’s toys. We believe that not all products require high costs. Even with video games, with current technology it is possible to create fun games with a compact number of developers in a miniature amount of time. We believe it is crucial not to lose sight of this perspective.
Fellow directors Shinya Takahashi and Ko Shiota followed Miyamoto’s response. Takahashi reiterated the importance of “unique, small-scale titles” that can be developed instead of spending huge amounts of money. He added that Switch has evolved to include various methods to limit cost increases. Shiota added that the company works demanding to ensure developers can work efficiently and that “bigger budgets don’t necessarily mean better ideas.” Nintendo’s president, Shuntaro Furukawa, said at the end that investments in development are necessary – otherwise Nintendo will not have great hardware and software at all.
In the same Q&A, Miyamoto dismissed a question calling him a “genius,” claiming that novel Nintendo employees described the Mario, Zelda and Pikmin creator as “surprisingly normal” after meeting him. Miyamoto also recently stated that he wants to be left out of the console wars and stated that Nintendo would prefer to go in a “different direction” than the rest of the industry when it comes to artificial intelligence.
This all precedes Nintendo’s announcement of its next Switch console. The company recently confirmed that Switch 2, for lack of a better name, will play Switch games, and Nintendo Switch Online will continue.
Photo: Lars Nicolaysen/picture Alliance via Getty Images.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Her posts can be found on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Have a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
