>>36965095All of Nintendo's first and second party devs seem to encourage small staff sizes. Two possible reasons for this;
- the devs at their own executive level want to keep their expenses down to pad their salaries
- nintendo doesn't pay them that well so that the devs couldn't hire more people even if they wanted
I suspect it's a bit of both. GF has been admitting in the last few interviews they're only now ready to hand over the reigns to their younger staff and involve them more. That's a 10-15 year stagnation at the executive management/personnel level.
Sakurai has made a meme of himself insofar as how hard he works to make the Smash Bros series, but I think it's actually pretty unprofessional to be so vocal about this – he doesn't have to pull such long hours if he just hires more people.
But, given the dude's work ethic, I think he's intentionally being this vocal – Nintendo's policy, budgeting, or whatever, probably forces these guys to work with small team sizes, and Sakurai is probably being more vocal to try and twist Nintendo's arm in budget/salary negotiations, I'd guess.
Masuda is sort of roundabout alluding to having had enough because he probably has. I think in 5-10 years we'll start seeing the next generation of studio directors giving interviews about just how shit Nintendo is running things.
