In the world of the video that we live in, games often fall into certain categories in regards to their development. Some “took too long to get made”, some were “rushed”, some are “money grabs”, and yes, there are many that were “worth the wait”. But sometimes, you wonder which developers push for which of these categories. Well, in the eyes of developer MercurySteam, Nintendo is one of the best publishers in the world to work with because they desire quality above all else.
If you don’t recall the name, MercurySteam was the team that brought Metroid: Samus Returns to the 3DS last year, and it was a very good game. And according to their Enric Álvarez, working with Nintendo is much better than working with certain Western developers:
“Especially with Nintendo, the biggest difference is all they care about is quality. All they care about is polish. All they care about is giving satisfaction to their players. The rest is secondary.
You can’t find this working for a western publisher because there’s always time constraints, there’s always a lot of pressure. There’s also pressure working in any environment, especially when we’re talking about massive amounts of money – they’re always somewhat very worried about that money, which is normal and fair. But I think that the biggest difference we’ve found is in our direction. It’s not saying there’s no pressure involved in both sides, but the pressure from a publisher from a Japanese publisher comes from that aspect – quality. And the pressure in our experience… the pressure coming from a western publisher comes from many other directions.”
High praise indeed. Now, as many will note, there are times when Nintendo doesn’t make the best moves in terms of development or game design. But, as the last 17 months have proven, they’ve been working really hard to develop some truly magnificent games. And apparently, it’s not just the gamers who notice this.
