This week I take a look at the possibilities of Nintendo creating a brand new Western development studio, alongside some thoughts on the Touch! Generations branding.

EAD West

Nintendo is a very Japan-centric company. For better or for worse, the way that Nintendo handles developing games over in Western countries has been more or less through partnerships than outright owning companies. Of course, Retro Studios is a first party developer, and Nintendo also has the likes of NST. What I feel Nintendo should have considered doing some time ago, would have been to create a brand new, large development team for the West. An EAD West, so to speak.

A team like this would hopefully have their own vision and creative drive. Letting them prototype their own ideas that are more loosely curated by the home office. Sure, the higher ups such as Iwata and Miyamoto would keep an eye on the team and offer guidance, but the main point of having a studio like this would be to let them form their own style and identity from within Nintendo.

It’s hard to say how much freedom teams like Retro really have. It does seem that most of the higher up producers are handed down from Japan. While I feel this creates a certain level of cohesiveness with Nintendo’s other products it can also can start to limit any uniqueness or varying taste that the studios games might have had without such a Japanese influence.

I think that a team like this should have been setup sometime over the Wii’s lifespan, or at the very least a year or two before the Wii U launched. Nintendo needs a different flavor of games, and a stronger Western lineup of studios would be a good place to start.

Touch! Generations

Throughout the Nintendo DS and Wii’s life, Nintendo started to create a branding that helped people who were not as familiar with game software. The Touch! Generations branding was a good idea and helped to create a lineup of titles that people began to associate with being largely more accessible. Nintendo ended up dropping the brand sometime ago, but was that a mistake?

It seems as though when the Nintendo 3DS was coming out Nintendo was trying to do things differently, seemingly just to try and separate the new system from the old. This is also why we got the form factor of the original 3DS, they wanted to make it different, even though the strange three layered look wasn’t very appealing. What I don’t understand is why must they throw out everything? A re-focusing of the brand and a larger advertising presence may have helped more than just dropping it completely.

Nintendo has sort of dropped right out of the so-called “casual games” market as well, but why? Have they run out of ideas? They are gearing up for some more “Wii” games later this year, but most of their strategy so far with the Wii U has been to try and court the gamer fans.

Maybe waiting for a big push in their second holiday season will prove to help in grabbing the more casual buyers attention, but I think they may have missed out on not trying harder from the start with a bigger push and a stronger casual focus.