Nintendo does release dates better than Sony

Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/NintendoAmerica/status/1151476650149683200

Luigi's mansion 3 comes out October 31st. That's around 1 year after its reveal. Other titles (like super mario odyssey or pokemon) were released within 1 year of being revealed.

With Sony? The Last Guardian took forever. Ghost of Tsushima was announced 2 years ago. The last of us 2 and death stranding have also been talked about for years. Same old story we always see, with delays galore.

When Sony reveals a game, you know you're waiting a long time. When Nintendo reveals a game, you can get hyped knowing you'll play it soon.

What about Metrood Prime 4?

@SolidGame_basic: That's an exception rather than the norm. They rebooted development on that game to meet the Nintendo golden standard, which is admirable and refreshing in an age of rushed/crappy releases.

@XVision84: so it sounds like you're ok with Sony taking time to release their games so that they're in the highest quality possible. The thing is you're comparing a smaller budget title like Luigi's Mansion to a full fledge AAA game with Hollywood level production values.

Yep, Nintendo are really good when releasing games especially by not rushing them and having them requiring massive day one patches. As someone who prefers the physical format for getting games on I really wish the rest of the industry would do this as well.

Didn't take long to poke holes in this thread.

The thing is, Metroid Prime 4 never ever had a official release date by Nintendo :)

Breath of the Wild says hi.

Good job nintendo on this

Neither did those Sony games he mentioned, but let's not start moving the goalposts now. We're gonna be waiting on Breath of the Wild 2 for quite some time.

@SolidGame_basic: Sony has been making big budget games for generations, I'm sure they have some idea on how long they typically take. I like Sony taking their time, just don't announce a game well before it's ready. 1 year is fine but 3 years before launch is too much.

It was never given a release window or date. Nintendo has also been forward about what's going on.

@BenjaminBanklin: Uncharted 4 was delayed multiple times and every game I mentioned was revealed many years before release.

Mentioning 1 exception to Nintendo's stellar reveal timing strategy doesn't prove your point. I can easily bring up the last guardian and dreams which were far far worse.

It took them a year and a half to let us know it was going back to the drawing board. I think it was all BS anyway. I think Nintendo just wanted to drop a big announcement for a game that wasn't even close to being in development. Either way, you may as well be pre-ordering a Switch 2 before we see that thing.

And how long did it take Breath of the Wild to come out after its announcement? Hell, they didn't even want to bring it out for the Wii U alone since it tanked and pushed it to crossplat with Switch.

@BenjaminBanklin: That was 3 years which is about standard for every Sony title. That's also only if you look at the brief announcement trailer for the sinking ship Wii U.

The actual reveal happened in 2016 which is when we saw much more of the game with even more footage thereafter. That was 1 year before release.

How many death stranding trailers have we had? How many times have we seen dreams? TLOU2?

It isn't even close, your points of contention with Nintendo are the norm for Sony lol.

A WiiU game that was postponed on its original platform so it could be a launch title for Switch?

Sony’s games are more involved so they take longer to develop. Most Nintendo games don’t have high end graphics, highly detailed environments, voice acting, motion capture and storywriting.

You could make something like Luigi’s Mansion 3, which will have limited story, limited voice acting, no mocap, and recycled assets from the other Luigi’s Mansion games in the time it takes to produce something like The Last of Us

Once they decided it wasn't worth launching on just WiiU, they also had to make some changes to remove features, like the ability to access inventory on the tablet without pausing the game.

Another classic GS thread backfire, nice.

Exactly. When you compare everything that goes into Sony's games the difference is night and day. When it comes to production values Nintendo is at least a gen behind. As an example it took 8 years to make Red Dead Redemption 2. You can probably make a Nintendo game in 8 months lol

I still think we can go shorter. I think a month between announcement to release would be great... and still catch that peak hype before people are bored with the idea.

A good question that would need to be asked is what it the total development time of those Nintendo games as a whole.

It's all relative.

Comparing Sony's AAA blockbuster exclusives to Nintendo's high profile Switch games is a apples to oranges comparison.

LOL! Nintendo guys need to stick to sales topics because everything else instantly falls apart for them.

Nintendo does everything better than Sony, except Online.

It’s funny how Sony PS4 still has the most and best exclusives releasing all the time....

Yet every Nintendo console suffers massive game droughts and maybe gets 1 game per year that might be considered “good”.

Sony does a much better job of providing games while Nintendo has nothing.

If everyone is done being stupid, we can get to the actual point now. It's a difference in strategy. Sony announces games as soon as the enter development so they can hype them for years and give the impression that there's more on the way. Nintendo, on the other hand (with a few exceptions depending on the IP and how well the platform is performing), prefers to announce things closer to release for a more condensed hype cycle and to reduce the chances of an announced game being cancelled or drastically delayed. It has nothing to do with budget or dev time, and anyone saying that it does is either being disingenuous or an idiot.

One advantage of getting out of the hardware power arms race is that dev times are shorter for Switch games than PS4 games. This allows Nintendo to generally release games sooner after being revealed than Sony. It's one reason why Switch and PS4 make a good paring if you're mostly interested in 1st party exclusives.

@silkylove: That doesn't make any sense unless you assume that games are always announced at the same point in development and can't be announced earlier or later.

@techhog89:

Every year both companies have to announce new games to keep players interested in their respective systems. So yes I think they both generally announce games that they've started working on a year or two prior. Difference is that the Nintendo game typically gets finished first. Sony can take more time because third party games supplement the lineup between major first party releases. Nintendo has less third party support so they need to have that faster turnaround for 1st party games and the less powerful hardware helps with that.

Then that just makes Sony look bad, considering they spend more development time on worse exclusives.

You mean Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild? The two games sitting at 97 on metacritic?

Pokemon Sword/Shield, Astral Chain, Fire Emblem Three Houses, and Luigi's Mansion are all coming out this year. At least PS4 has Death Stranding coming up. What was the last big PS4 exclusive? Days Gone, sitting at a 5/10? And before that Spiderman, which is almost a year old now.

Yeah, I really like that they give out release dates shortly before the games are released, compared to other companies. It's very nice.

Nintendo has improved on their release dates which a good thing.

@silkylove: So you think LM3 only started development last summer? You really are pretty dumb in that case. This is 100% based on strategy, which is why there are exceptions.

@XVision84: Could it be because Nintendo games are built on far older technology and are probably just easier to produce? Outside of Zelda: BotW thier formula hasn't evolved much.

@r-gamer: I wouldn't say so because the games are built to push that technology to its limits while integrating the unique spin Nintendo puts on its systems.

They are creative in how they use their IPs even within their general formula which I agree they stick to.

@techhog89:

I have no idea when LM3 started development. I do know that an AAA game takes about 18-36 months dev time on average. Sony's AAA games are probably on the longer end of that and Nintendo's the shorter end. The reasoning behind that is pretty simple and has been spelled out by myself and others.

You are correct. Nintendo tends to focus on the gaming experience over the cinematic don't touch the controller experience that Sony tends to favor.

AAA in a year and a half.... Okay man. Sure...

Your theory is wrong. When a game is announced is 100% a marketing call. Nothing more, nothing less. There's no quota forcing games to be announced ASAP. Nintendo can announce games sooner if they want to, and Sony can announce them later if they want to. If doing so would mean that Sony is lacking in announcements for the year, that would change nothing because releases matter more and it wouldn't affect that. Sony does it because they think that announcing games ASAP generates more hype. It's as simple as that.

I never said game announcement wasn't a marketing call. I said that in general an AAA Nintendo game releases sooner after announcement than an AAA Sony game. I didn't pull the 18-36 months out of my ass. There are plenty of articles on AAA game development by developers which back up that claim on Forbes, Vice, and elsewhere. Sony typically announces their games further out because development of their games takes longer and announcements of future big games helps maintain momentum and sell systems. If you think Luigi's Mansion 3 or any other typical (non original Zelda or Metroid) Nintendo game takes as much dev time as Spiderman (4 years), God of War (4 years) or Horizon (6 years) then I want some of whatever you're smoking.

@silkylove Well, LM3 development started in 2016 so i guess its right around Sony AAA dev time :)

@ajuicematts:

So about 3 years total even though it started out as a Wii U game. That's still shorter dev time than most Sony AAA exclusives. Just look at Dreams which started development in 2012 and is still in early access, or The Last of Us 2 which started development in 2014 and we probably won't see until Q1 2020...if we're lucky.

Uh... You just proved that 18-36 months is completely wrong...

And either way I'm not denying that Sony's games take longer to make at the high end; I'm just saying that's irrelevant to this conversation. If Sony waited until closer to release they'd still be announcing the same number of games, so no, they don't need to announce them ASAP and do years of teasing.

How did I disprove the general consensus among developers that an AAA game typically takes about 18-36 months? I hope you don't mean because I gave the dev times for 3 PS4 exclusives. That would be one hell of a logical leap. The 18-36 month estimate is for ALL games considered to be AAA. That includes games for PC, Xbox One, Switch, and PS4. Sony's dev time for their AAA exclusives often goes above the 36 month high end of the estimate, but that's how averages work. Since they usually announce within the first year or so of development, that means that the Sony consumer typically waits longer from announcement to when the game goes gold than say a Nintendo consumer. Which get's back to the original post in this thread.

AKA Nintendo can't tell stories for shit.

@Pedro: except there’s lots of gameplay in games like Horizon, God of War, Uncharted or Last of Us. Only games that argument works for is Quantic Dream games.

Nintendo tends to announce games closer to when they will be out so that is usually a win. Sony does a good job overall as well for the most part.

well you can't really be pick and choosy. Yes some games take longer than others.

Dreams had dev hell and was restarted at least twice.

just because a game takes forever doesn't mean its for the better. You equating long dev time to quality of product is what im countering. They aren't always correlated.

And if you wanna really use long dev time, i could use Pikmin 4 (which even fits your non Zelda/Metroid guideline) and say dev time has been like 6+ years and we haven't even seen a single screen shot. Meaning it wont release till 2021 at the earliest. So i guess that means its better quality than all of Sony's games?

I'm not sure where you thought I was equating dev time to quality. I didn't say that, and I certainly don't believe that. My only point was that Sony AAA exclusives tend to take more dev time than Nintendo AAA exclusives. And I agree, Pikmin 4 is a good example of a Nintendo game taking longer than usual. It might be trash when it's finally released. I hope not. I also don't think that there is much difference in quality between Sony and Nintendo exclusives in general. I enjoy both of their offerings.