Nintendo keeps refusing to say who makes its games, and with Princess Peach Showtime seemingly developed by a beloved studio nobody's sure why

Mar. 8, 2024

“The development team will be credited in the game credits”, Nintendo says, and not before

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Dataminers have apparently uncovered the developer behind Princess Peach: Showtime, even as Nintendo continues its very strange pattern of refusing to announce who’s behind its games ahead of launch.

“The development team will be credited in the game credits,” Nintendo tellsEurogamer. That statement comes afterplayers dataminedthe recent Princess Peach: Showtime demo to uncover hints that it might be developed by Good-Feel. That’s the independent Japanese studio that’s worked with Nintendo on games like Kirby’s Epic Yarn and Yoshi’s Crafted World.

If Good-Feel is truly the studio behind Princess Peach: Showtime, why is Nintendo actively choosing to withhold that information from the world? Kirby’s Epic Yarn is a well-loved Wii classic, and while Yoshi’s Crafted World got a more muted reception, its reputation is still decent. Plus, you’d think the simple fact that Nintendo chose this studio as a development partner would be a strong enough indication of its game-making chops.

Nintendo regularly partners with third-party studios on all but its biggest games, with notable examples including Intelligent Systems and HAL Laboratory, which are both largely responsible for some of the company’s biggest franchises. Yet in recent years, Nintendo has been reluctant to offer pre-release credit to its partners.

This became a notabletalking pointlast year when fans started to wonder who was working on the Super Mario RPG remake. That reimagining turned out to be excellent - check out ourSuper Mario RPG reviewfor more - and little wonder since it was built at ArtePiazza, the Japanese studio primarily known for terrific remakes and remasters of the Dragon Quest series.

Obviously, Nintendo is free to reveal as much or as little about its games as it wants to pre-release, but this feels like the sort of information that is typically just provided in a press release the instant a game is announced. You’d think that the developers behind a game would also want to be recognized as the people who are actually making it, too. You don’t have to wait until the end credits of Barbie to find out it was led by Greta Gerwig, after all.

Maybe Nintendo wants everyone to think that it exclusively develops its games internally? Given how many people think Intelligent Systems and HAL Laboratory are first-party studios, that might be working. Maybe the company wants to emphasize how closely it works with external studios by… not revealing that they exist until after launch?

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I’m just very confused by all this, especially in a gaming industry that has trended toward offering more transparency about how games are made - and the specific people responsible for making them - than ever before. Here’s hoping the next time Nintendo reveals a new mid-tier release, we don’t have to rely on dataminers to uncover the people actually making it.

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