Next Level Games Only Making Nintendo Games Now

While many fans look at Nintendo and think that they alone provide content for their systems, few realize that the Big N has a stable of talented development studios who help them. In some cases, they are owned by Nintendo (such as Retro Studios) but there are many second-party studios which are overseen by Nintendo but remain their own entity (this was the situation with RARE back in the N64 days). This has been a rather smart strategy as it keeps their games from feeling to similar while keeping their internal development teams from overextending themselves. These studios are often given a specific franchise which plays to the strengths of the development team and in some cases, they are even given the responsibility of crafting a brand new franchise.

One noteworthy studio which has had a long history with Nintendo is Next Level Games who have been responsible for many excellent titles such as the Mario Strikers series, the Punch-Out!! reboot for Wii and the recent Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon for 3DS which was a huge hit. In a bit of good news for fans of the studio, Next Level Games Co-founder Jason Carr has recently stated:

"We are doing only Nintendo products now" 

“We’re super happy with our relationship with Nintendo. There’s no reason to look anywhere else. They keep giving us better and better IP to work with, and as long as we do our job and make good games for them there’s no reason for us to venture out. 

“There are a lot of benefits to working with a first party. Nintendo’s great. They give you the time to make they games good. They’ve done really well — the Wii’s done really well, the DS has done really well, the Wii U is not the strongest start but we trust that they’ll come up with something to get it going, and the 3DS was a blast to work on.”

This is great news and with the industry feeling the pain of the ever failing economy, I am sure more second-party studios will begin to take a similar approach. The truth is that Nintendo focuses on their games more than anything and in return, those game tend to yield solid (if not excellent) sales. Game developers need a certain level of security and Nintendo is happy to extend their support to those companies who help them.

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