NintendObs Thinks: Videogame bribes explained, a theory.
How third-party games manage to be exclusively not on Nintendo.
Let’s say you’re a developer, developing a game. Or better yet, let’s say you’re a publisher, publishing a game. A videogame platform manufacturer comes to you and says: “Oh, that’s a nice game you’ve got there! Here are a couple of thousand dollars. Our treat. No strings attached.” You take the money. Such a nice videogame platform manufacturer they are. Then the platform manufacturer comes around again and says: “Oh, that must be really hard to make… You know what, lemme give you a couple more thousand dollars for your effort. You’re really working really hard, I’m sure this token of our appreciation can help.” Again, you take the money. But when comes the decision of which platforms to put your game on, a game which effectively just got subsidied by a platform manufacturer: which platform are you going to support?
Obviously, for sure you’re going to put your game on the platform of the manufacturer that got so generous to you. But let’s say you took the money and didn’t put your game on their platform, and that money has a noticeable impact on the quality of your game and your games moving forward. The platform manufacturer is no longer going to give you any more money, that’s a given fact. How are you going to afford to maintain the growing quality of your games? And let’s say you do put your game on the platform of the benevolent manufacturer, but also put it on that of another manufacturer who weren’t so benevolent themselves? Is the philanthropic manufacturer still going to give you money for your future games? I don’t think so.
Nintendo doesn’t give money to third-party developers unless Nintendo are publishing the game themselves: just think for a second about the impact on let’s say Intelligent Systems’ morale if they were to learn that their parent company paid a third-party publisher for a multiplatform release, but somehow told their own studio they didn’t have any money for a new Advance Wars game. So let’s get back to you as a developer or publisher. A videogame platform manufacturer gives you unconditional money for your game, but Nintendo doesn’t, and these games sure don’t make themselves. Are you going to put your game on Nintendo? …OK, the Nintendo Switch has an 80 million consoles install base, you could take the risk, but are you really going to invest the extra resources in bringing your game to Nintendo’s platform at the expense of losing the financial support of another platform manufacturer?