Nintendo on measures it’s taking for rising development costs and increased game prices

Just like the rest of the gaming industry, Nintendo is not immune to rising development costs and the time it takes to create titles. President Shuntaro Furukawa shared a few thoughts on the subject during a shareholders meeting last week.

Furukawa was asked about measures Nintendo is taking about higher game development costs and rising prices, which could mean fewer people playing games. One of his more noteworthy comments is that the company thinks it can come out with appealing titles “even with a short development period,” which could be a way to help the situation.

Furukawa stated (via machine translation):

“Recently, game software development has become larger in scale and longer in duration, and as a result, development costs are also rising. The game business is inherently a high-risk business, but we recognize that the risk is increasing even more as development costs rise.

Even as game software development has become larger in scale and longer in duration, our development team is trying various ideas to find ways to maintain traditional production. We believe that it is important to make the necessary investments while developing as efficiently as possible.

We also believe that it is possible to develop game software that customers will think is an interesting idea, even with a short development period. We believe that this could be one measure to address the issue of development costs and game software prices only going up, so we would like to consider this from various angles within the company.”

From that same meeting, Furukawa talked again about the price of Nintendo Switch 2 and the impact that could have on younger players. You can find that here.