MarioWiki:Proposals/Archive/73

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Decide how to handle Nintendo's development teams

canceled by proposer
Okay, this might be a bit controversial.

Most of the companies (at least the ones shown in {{Companies}}) have the parent company and development team in a single page, and they also contain histories that include games made by companies before their consolidation via a merger (Square Enix is a great example of what I'm talking about, they made Mario games as both Square and Square Enix), yet their predecessor companies aren't split from the main page. There are obviously exceptions, like Hudson Soft, but the difference is that every Mario game made by Hudson (and Hudson's parent company Konami) were made before Konami fully acquired Hudson, so the development teams of both at the time of said Mario games are different, and Hudson's name had been deprecated by 2015, unlike Square Enix, in which the Square name continues to be used. Nintendo also owns other game studios, like Retro Studios and Next Level Games, but they do have a history of being independent from Nintendo prior to their acquisitions, and they remain separate studios from Nintendo.

The argument can be made that games made by any development studio owned by Nintendo simply credits Nintendo's name in the title screen, only showing the name of the development team in the credits (which might extend to EAD/SPD/EPD, I guess), but what separates EAD/SPD/EPD from the rest is that Nintendo had full involvement in their creations, and are treated as divisions, not subsidiaries. Even if my last point about the type of daughter company doesn't make sense, many companies (like Konami) make their development teams subsidiaries, and they are still a part of their parent company's page. Plus, EAD and SPD are the legal predecessors of EPD and therefore, EPD continues the same operations as their predecessors.

My biggest point is that development teams in this wiki are often placed in the same page as their parent company, with some of the game pages not even listing the full name of the development team. At the very least, seeing how this wiki treats merged entities as the same companies before and after merge, I would like to see a merge between EAD and EPD if possible. Here are my options:

• Merge EAD, SPD, and EPD into Nintendo: All of Nintendo's development divisions get merged with Nintendo.
• Merge EAD and EPD into Nintendo: Nintendo's game development teams will merge with Nintendo, SPD, as a support team, stays separate.
• Merge EAD and SPD into EPD: Merges EPD's predecessors into EPD; will remain a separate page from Nintendo.
• Merge EAD into EPD: Merges the predecessor development team of Nintendo into its current form.
• Do nothing: Pages remain how they were.

Option 1 will consolidate all of Nintendo's development divisions into the Nintendo page. Option 2 will leave SPD separate. Option 3 merges EPD's predecessors with EPD. Option 4 will only merge EAD into EPD, again leaving SPD separate. Option 5 will leave the pages as is.

Proposer: Altendo (talk)
Deadline: February 4, 2025, 23:59 GMT Cancelled on January 21, 2025

Merge EAD, SPD, and EPD into Nintendo

1. Altendo (talk) Secondary choice. The Nintendo page already seems big enough, but if this is to make it consistent with other companies that have their development teams in the same page as their parent company, then this seems fine. Also, it feels weird to leave a single division of Nintendo out of the page if everything else merges in.
2. Super Mario RPG (talk) I doubt there's much different to say about the different departments of Nintendo involving the Super Mario franchise other than the games they have developed.

Merge EAD into EPD

1. Altendo (talk) Primary choice. While it makes sense to merge EAD into EPD due to their history of being Nintendo's flagship division, I also feel like SPD should stay separate due to their history of helping with development from third-party companies.
2. Camwoodstock (talk) Secondary choice. If we had to merge any of these, merging the two teams that were directly predecessor and successor at least makes some sense, though we do wonder about the precedent this sets.

Do nothing

1. Camwoodstock (talk) Primary choice. Admittedly, we don't feel particularly strongly about merging any of these companies in particular. SPD is one of many side-teams dedicated to a few series in particular, and while EPD is the successor to EAD, we can't think of any time we've merged two development studios just because of one being the direct replacement for another.
2. Nintendo101 (talk) These are different studios that happen to have the title of their publisher, the parent company in their names. They are composed of different individual creators, overseen by different publishers and directors, are sometimes in completely different buildings, and are informed by different creative philosophies. If we are to have separate articles for Next Level Games, Retro Studios, we should have different articles for Nintendo EAD, Nintendo SPD, their successor Nintendo EPD, and their other studios. While not the aim of this proposal, I worry lumping studios in this manner would mitigate the fact that video games are made by different groups of people, and not a faceless publishing entity.
3. Jdtendo (talk) It's better to emphasize that Nintendo is made up of different teams that work on different games and not one monolithic company. I know that this isn't how we treat other companies, but it makes sense to give Nintendo a broader coverage considering they (unsurprisingly) made a lot of Mario games unlike, say, Squaresoft that only made one Mario game before it merged with Enix, or Konami that made a grand total of 5 Mario games. Besides, lumping all of the info about Nintendo teams into a single article would be indigestible.