 I think it's time for the triple A industry to start taking pages out of Nintendo's handbook when it comes to game development, especially when it comes to western studios. Jason Schreyer, who is a writer, an editor specifically a news editor for Kotaku, and one of my most respected people in the video game media sphere, I know there's a lot of BS that kind of happens in video game media, but none of it really from him. I really respect the work he does at Kotaku, and yes, I'm talking about Kotaku, and I'll let many people still have old grudges against before Stefan Tatillo actually turned the side around, and now it actually has quality video game coverage, believe it or not. He tweeted out something that's very very interesting because he's talked to several devs over the years, he wrote a book, blah blah blah, and he said on Twitter, every layoff studio closure and crunch story I hear about keeps making me think one thing, the video game industry is not sustainable. There's no stat, and he did this over two tweets, for how many games have been crippled by a lack of senior devs, because experienced devs feel exploited, burnt out, and they leave games. Now this covers two different fields, one, obviously dealing with crunch, dealing with crippling and driving, you know, the quality game creators and senior devs out of the industry, to other programming jobs that are obviously more stable and a better, you know, life slash work balance. It's easy to get burned out in the video game industry, especially in the West, and then there's a secondary conversation about how the video game industry itself is not sustainable. Now, video game industry is not going to crash, let's just talk about that right now. We can argue that triple-A gaming in some aspects may be on the verge of crashing at certain studios, but overall the video game industry is very health. It is the largest in terms of money coming in entertainment industry in the world. It has so much money flowing through it, that it's too, it's one of those is too big to really fully crash. That doesn't mean the triple-A industry won't. The indie industry has been thriving, obviously mobile developers, you know, for phones have been thriving, especially when they get a big hit, but obviously certain triple-A studios don't. There's been studio closings happening pretty consistently since the HD twins and the Xbox 360 PlayStation 3 came out, because video game budgets really exploded around that time. And because of the exploding nature of video game budgets and the exploding nature of marketing budgets to market those games, it became this thing where sometimes certain aspects of the video game industry are not sustainable. And a lot of things are introduced because of this. And Crunch is one of them. And Crunch is a wholly negative thing in the industry, especially at a big triple-A publisher, because you don't really have a choice. You either put up with the Crunch or you don't have a job. And you're really only going to put up with the Crunch, because you're super passionate about, you know, making video games. Generally, when you're a senior dev and you're working on a game and you're dealing with Crunch, you're underpaid. I mean, let's just say what it is. You're generally underpaid. And that's kind of what Jason Schreiber comments here a little bit when he says, you know, they're crippled. You know, the industry is kind of crippled by the lack of senior devs, because experienced devs feel like they've been exploited. And then they get burnt out and they decide to leave the game industry and go on to something better. So what I want to counteract this all with. And as I said, the video game industry isn't dying. It's not about the Crash, even though certain studios may be about to crash. It said the industry needs to take a note out of Nintendo's playbook. So here's some big differences between Western development and Nintendo. And maybe this is true of certain Japanese companies as well. But I'm going to focus on Nintendo or Nintendo Prime. And I am well versed on how Nintendo handles their development cycles in comparison to say what happens in the West. So in the West, not only is there crunch, there is this ability where they everyone's like a contract employee, right? You're working on a 1099, not everyone of course, but a lot of employees. And then as you get closer and closer to releasing the game, you might hire on extra 100 200 developers on a month to month, you know, status and they're dealing with crunch and they're doing this. And then once the game comes out, all those developers are let go, because that's just the way the industry works in the West. You build up the teams, these really big numbers to make a game, and then you let everyone go, and then you don't hire a bunch of people again until you need it for another game down the road, and you rinse and repeat. And that's how you always end up with developers bouncing around companies, whether it's Ubisoft, EA, Bethesda, Activision, blah, blah, blah, all the companies, these big AAA companies that just keep bouncing around, gaining lots of experience along the way, but never really sticking at any individual company. Now again, this isn't true of everyone. The core parts of the team are usually they're long term. But this, you know, that's not actually the majority of the people working on the game. That's actually just the core group that has, you know, even if they're contracted, they have long term contracts, you know, years worth of contracts, and get health benefits and all that jazz. Whereas like a 1099 employee doesn't get any of that stuff, they got to pay for it out of pocket. And that's part of being underappreciated and exploited and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's a very common thing in the West, in the video game industry, at least, and maybe it's common in other programming industries as well. But we're just talking about video games at Nintendo. It's very different. So when Nintendo hires you, they're not hiring you as a temporary solution to a currently existing problem. As an example, when they have to ramp up development on a game like Super Mario Odyssey or Breath of the Wild and put more people on the team, they will either move people from another project to it, or they will hire some more people on and the people they hire on are not let go once the game is done. They are dispersed to other teams that need them or they are kept on with the current team to work on the next game. So when Zelda's team blew up to probably over 200 people working on it, they probably kept some of those new hires they brought in for the game to work on the next Zelda game. Nintendo is a company that works against the grain of crunch and against the grain in terms of just how they handle employees. Even when they hire people in North America, which is a Western place, has crunch retro studios Nintendo of America, they don't hire people on planning for them to leave after the completion of a game. They hire them on for longer term contracts. Now, obviously, people do leave because we are talking about an industry where, you know, you could be a music composer at retro studios, but maybe you get an offer from another place, or even an indie developer, or several different places that you overall can make more money doing that than necessarily keeping your stable job at Nintendo. Plus, there's always disagreements in the direction of certain things. And yeah, there's multiple reasons that employees will, you know, choose to leave jobs. But generally, Nintendo doesn't plan for you to leave. When they hire you on, they want you there pretty much until you are ready to retire. Unless you do something at the company that is in violation of the code of conduct, or they feel like you're underperforming at your job, or what have you, just like any employer. So what Nintendo has done because they were don't worry as much about crunch, they don't necessarily worry about having to nail a release date and sticking strictly to it. And they allow the employees to stay with the company and just disperse them and move them around to different projects. It has allowed Nintendo to maintain smaller budgets on their games. Now, you can also argue because Nintendo's systems like the Wii U, 3DS and Switch are not as powerful as the competitor systems that maybe their games won't shouldn't cost as much anyways. But let's be honest, they are now making HD games. So they should be dealing with HD budgets and outside of a select few titles that that get that kind of budget. Yeah, it's not really an issue at Nintendo. Now we can infer that Breath of the Wild might have been their most expensive game they've ever made. They said they needed to sell two million copies of the game to break even from a development standpoint. And if we assume Nintendo's profit margin per sale, and we're just going to go off physical, let's say the profit margin is 35 to 40 bucks per sale of a game, you know, when you take out the retailer's cut plus shipping and manufacturing and blah, blah. So when you take all of that out, and let's say they make $35 per game, you know, if you look at two, you know, two million in sales to break even, you're looking at a game that cost almost between 80 to $100 million to make. And that's a lot for Nintendo. Now other studios will spend 200 million 300 sometimes half a billion dollars to make a game. Now the friend now that that's actually a rare occurrence that the games that will do that are like a grand theft auto that's going to sell 80 million plus units and be well worth that kind of financial investment. But there's a lot of studios that spend 100 million plus dollars on things that are not for sure. Zelda is a for sure thing. Even if Breath of the Wild was poorly received, it was still going to sell at least two million units. They were still going to at least break even because every Zelda game, essentially, if it's a mainline Zelda game, not, you know, not an experimental game like a Triforce Heroes, but a true mainline Zelda game home consoles all the game, especially none of them have ever sold less than two million units. So there's literally no risk in spending that big budget in terms of worrying about losing that money and not being able to make it back. So Nintendo can put 100 million dollars into a game like that. Just like Activision can justify putting 100 million dollars into a call of duty or, you know, any, you know, probably Ubisoft could justify putting that kind of money into an assassin's creed. And that kind of stuff should continue. But what needs to happen is when you make all these other games like a Super Mario Odyssey or a Xenoblade Chronicles 2 as an example, these are made by smaller teams on smaller budgets and they go on to sell millions upon millions of copies. What has happened in the triple A industry is that a lot of studios are trying to make the Witcher 3 all over again. And the thing is the Witcher 3 didn't get to have the budget it did to make that game just because they wanted to have that budget. They started with the Witcher, sold enough copies of that to have a bigger budget for the Witcher 2, sold enough copies of the Witcher 2 to have a bigger budget for Witcher 3. You see, they already made the profits they needed to to fund the next game. That is how the Witcher 3 ended up having a really big budget and that helped make the game better and the game went on to sell millions and millions of copies. And here's the thing, the Witcher 3 didn't be like, hey look, we're going to come out in two years at this date and we're going to hit it. They will delay the game in order to make it better. And that's what Nintendo will do as well. How many times has Breath of the Wild delayed? That increases the budget with every single delay, but it's worthwhile to Nintendo to do that because they worry more about the game being done and not overworking their employees to the point they don't even want to come to work anymore. And that's why the industry needs to start acting more like Nintendo. They need to be willing to maybe cut back on yearly releases and focus on quality. Not just quality of the game but quality of the employees' lives. Crunch is something that really should be eliminated. I'm not saying there can't be moments where you need to ask employees to work overtime or have them come in on a weekend, but that should be rare and that should be within weeks of a game coming out for final bug ironing outs for your day one patch or whatever the case may be. It shouldn't be going on for months and months at a time because you're going to burn people out, especially if you're not giving them a fair wage to compensate them for coming in so much because you're affecting their family life, their life with their kids, and if you don't have a balance between work and life, you're going to end up hating yourself and that's not something that Nintendo wants their employees to do. They want you to respect your work and respect your family and Nintendo will respect your family life and your work life and try to help you balance it. Not even Shigemio Motou has to stay away from his family so much making games that he has to worry about that balance between work and life and Shigemio Motou, I think we all agree, is a pretty big deal at Nintendo. So yeah the industry just needs to start looking at how Nintendo does things and I realize there's a cultural difference between Japan and the West, the East and the West, there's just different things in culture but I don't see how what Nintendo is doing is unsustainable in the West. I think in the West there's too much focus on having to grab that big hit. We need to we need to spend a hundred, two hundred million dollars do all this crunch, rush a game out while we have hype because the rest of the wild had hype back in 2014 and look at that it still didn't come out until 2017. You don't need to take advantage of the hype then if your game is that good it will gather hype when it needs to as Breath of the Wild did and as Super Mario Odyssey has done this whole time. As Splatoon 2 kind of did, Splatoon 2 was kind of tepid in response and it had a lot of hype heading in the launch. So you need to take a step back in the West and start using smaller budgets on your games that so you have a smaller sales target to be profitable. As an example Dead Space was kind of killed off by EA because I believe the second or the third game they added in microtransactions and made it all action-y and it didn't sell enough copies for EA for the game to either be profitable or it just barely broke even. Here's the thing if they had a smaller budget on that game say ten to twenty million dollars on that game made by a smaller studio that was allowed to work on that game for you know four or five years instead of trying to rush it out in a year or two and drop in a hundred million dollars or whatever the case may be on that game. They would only need to sell like a million copies to break even. Even less than a million and if they sold you know I think that game sold like four or five million units that would be a massive profit margins. There are other ways to make huge amounts of money in this industry beyond going for broke and trying to make the next Assassin's Creed the next Call of Duty the next player unknown battleground the next Zelda or Mario. You can do smaller budget on AAA games and have them build up as the franchise becomes more and more popular to justify a higher budget. The Witcher is actually a nice example of a western studio albeit in Europe that started with practically no money created this game in the Witcher and built it up into this huge franchise. That's how you should be doing it and I feel like Western Studios forget that they focus so much on crunch so much on dropping hundreds of millions of dollars to push the top of the absolute top of the line visual quality the best cutscenes the best that and I understand that there is some expectation from gamers for that but I feel like that should only be with the already proven games the already proven franchises that have already made the money to afford that budget. Call of Duty has made enough money to afford whatever budget they want to spend on Call of Duty probably for like the next you know several decades whereas you know a game like Dead Space has not a game like Resident Evil might not have necessarily have although it's obviously eastern game hasn't necessarily earned a big enough budget to kind of spend that on every single game so yeah just just listen to or don't even listen to just follow Nintendo's example. Nintendo does a lot of things that are behind the times you guys know I'm highly critical of them but one thing they have done consistently that has been vastly different from the west is just how they handle their employees you're not brought on temporarily there's not a lot of crunch you are allowed the time to get your games right they don't overspend on their games in general they will take risk with new IPs on smaller budgets and they will let franchises organically grow and let the budgets grow with those franchises they've made enough money on Mario that they could have spent 200 plus million dollars on Super Mario Odyssey if they want but they don't need to to make the game they need they need to or wanted to make so yep take note from Nintendo industry if you want to avoid some of the issues that Jason Schreyer brings up you know with crunch and driving away the top developers and how the triple A industry itself might not be sustainable in the west follow Nintendo's example and you're going to find out that you're a highly profitable company Nintendo has only had like two years ever of profit loss so Nintendo knows what they're doing here and Nintendo's games have always sold well and I don't know why more companies don't model themselves after how Nintendo handles things anyways folks I'm Nathaniel Ruffeljens from Nintendo Prime if you like this video you know what to do and if you dislike the video hit that dislike button let's subscribe for more content wait let's wait I'm gonna subscribe to my own I don't know I'll catch you guys in the next one