Nintendo has no plans to grow Western development teams

Despite Nintendo’s current video games dominance across the globe, NoA senior vice president George Harrison has said that the platform holder has no plans to increase its current Western-developed output.

Speaking to Wired, Harrison stated: "I’m not aware of any plans to push for more software development here in the US. The actual decision about producing more software and who should do it is driven by Satoru Iwata and the management team, including Mr. Miyamoto, in Japan.

"Our third party partners are doing a great job both on DS and on Wii. They tend to provide product in categories that we aren’t particularly good at doing, like sports or other genres. And since they’re Western publishers, they tend to be more in tune with Western tastes."

Only three first party Wii games to date have emerged from Western developers – Retro Studios’ Metroid Prime 3, Monster Games’ Excite Truck, and Next Level Games’ Mario Strikers Charged Football.

And Nintendo’s association with European developers has been even more sporadic. Though the firm enjoyed a successful relationship with UK-based Rare until it sold the developer to Microsoft, the only European first party titles to date to have emerged outside of this coupling are Kuju’s Battalion Wars and Fuse duo Metroid Pinball and Super Mario Ball.