That went down like trying to make Top Gear without Jeremy Clarkson, in that it was rubbish, so they’ve started over with Retro on board. They were initially been mysteriously excluded from the initial development of Metroid Prime 4 – they made the first three, for reference. I don’t think there’s a soul alive who follows Nintendo and doesn’t now know what Retro Studios are working on. (Last Release: Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze, 2014/2018) Retro Studios: Currently working on Metroid Prime 4 as of Jan. Super Mario Party only came out at the end of last year, so any new game would barely be in pre-production at this point – but SMP also did enormously better than anyone at Nintendo thought it was going to, so there’s potentially DLC / a follow-up to that in the pipeline as well.
For instance, after Hudson Soft, responsible for among other things Mario Party 1 through 8, where assimilated into fellow Japanese-developer-slash-amorphous-blob Konami, NDCube have worked on the Mario Party series ever since. NDCube is a quiet little studio nestled in Nintendo’s bonnet – and they’re quiet mainly because they’ve picked up the slack where fellow development studios have dropped by the wayside. This is the case with half of Monolith Soft (and lesser-known team 1-UP Studios), but the other half is just winding down working on Xenoblade Chronicles 2 DLC, probably so they can soon begin work on another game about bug-eyed teenagers with modern art exhibits for hair, like every game they’ve made since 2002. Nintendo relatively recently had the genius idea of instead of making the big central Nintendo brain even more bulging and cumbersome, to turn a few smaller developers (and Monolith Soft, which is not small at all) into mini-Nintendos and give them smaller parts of bigger games to work on. Monolith Soft: Development Co-operation (and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 DLC) But I bring this up because it’s quite an exciting time to look into what these second-party studios are working on, and I’m sure you’ll notice the pattern as I’m going along that makes this so. But even beyond this lumbering behemoth are over a dozen second-party companies (and a few smaller first-party ones) that churn out what many people label as “Nintendo games” (not without reason, of course, because they are) without having any major interaction with the big central Nintendo brain. The people behind even a first-party “Nintendo” game form multiple departments, institutes and complexes to the point where getting a game together must be like coaxing a blind ferret through the minotaur’s labyrinth.
It can often seem like Nintendo’s company layout is just one huge, amorphous mass a bit like looking at an overview of UK’s betting apps – and that’s probably because it is.