Nintendo has been known to allow third-party companies to handle its franchises in the past. One example of this is The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, which launched on the Game Boy Advance back in 2005 and was developed by Capcom. Speaking to IGN, Nintendo mainstay Shigeru Miyamoto stated that the company is looking into ways of increasing staff numbers to develop more titles in-house, as well partnering up with subsidiaries, as opposed to releasing its brands to third-party studios. The hope here is to create both new games and even new IPs.

“[We’ve] been working on what we can do to increase our internal staff in a way that will allow us to have more projects going at the same time,” said Miyamoto. “We’re doing this not by going out of house to different companies and having them develop games for us, but instead by working with partner companies and subsidiaries in a way that allows the Tokyo studio to run more projects.”

“In the past, we had what we called the collaboration projects, which were sort of like an outside company almost doing a cover of our games with their own studios,” explained Shiggy. “The determination that we’ve come to more recently is that we prefer to have an internal Nintendo producer who’s there to oversee any outside development work that’s happening, to make sure that it’s in line with what we expect out of our games.”

Nintendo has managed to deliver great projects as a publisher when working with developers such as Retro Studios, Next Level Games, and even Monolith Soft. While some may question the strategy to refrain from working more closely with third parties, it’s definitely worked for Nintendo in the past. Xenoblade Chronicles, Metroid Prime, and Donkey Kong Country Returns are absolutely stellar titles that spawned out of the company working with devs who were pretty close to home.

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