There’s an interesting, if unsurprising reason, why Nintendo has been recently hiding the identities of the companies and developers making their newly announced games.
Recently, Nintendo announced several new games coming to the Switch, such as Mario & Luigi Brothership, and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. However, Nintendo did not immediately reveal the studios who were working on these games, and this has led to some online discourse. Some gamers and games media criticize Nintendo, and other game companies, for keeping the identities of the devs secret.
There’s a perception that some companies like Nintendo want fans to believe that only Nintendo makes all their games. There are others who feel that Nintendo is being secretive simply because it’s a long established industry practice, and that that’s a bad industry practice. And there are people who have seen how gamers react negatively when an announced game was not being made by the studio they preferred, and Nintendo is mitigating that negative reaction.
Kit Ellis and Krysta Yan addressed this question in a recent YouTube video. Now, Kit and Krysta are YouTubers and podcasters now, but they are uniquely qualified to answer this question, because they are former public relations managers for Nintendo of America. They each have 13 and 15 years in Nintendo respectively, from the DS and Wii era to the Switch era.
Kit and Krysta are careful to say that this is ‘what they believe’ is the reason, but it’s highly likely that they actually just know the reason, since this practice was still going on before they left the company.
The way Krysta puts it is by the community of Nintendo fans ‘talking about the developer, it’s distracting you from the gameplay.’ Kit then raises the hypothetical question Nintendo would be asking internally: why do you need to know?
And Kit’s point there is Nintendo can choose to limit what their consumers know about the game, including the identities of the developers, until when it finally releases. There’s no FOIA or legal need to know who the developers are immediately, not when we’re just talking about marketing.
Kit and Krysta also point out that Shinya Takahashi, as Senior Managing Executive Officer at Nintendo, and the presenter for Nintendo Directs nowadays, was likely the person who chose this approach, with the mindset that the developers should focus on making and polishing the game, than having to work double to sell it to consumers.
They also point out that this is a way of protecting the studios making the games, because there have been real cases where studios have experienced toxicity and harassment from fans. But Krysta also pointed out that limiting interaction with fans may put the devs in a position where they didn’t get feedback that they needed. There really could be something there, as Nintendo’s own The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which was made in complete secrecy, lost out to many GOTY awards to Baldur’s Gate 3, a title that spent two years in Steam Early Access.
Ultimately, it doesn’t seem that Nintendo will change this approach, since they would be prioritizing protecting their developers. After all, when the game finally releases, we can get all this information on the game credits. Not everyone may agree with this approach, but it has worked out for Nintendo overall.
