Nintendo wants to be hands-on with its own games, particularly when developed by an external partner. To do that, it's willing to expand its teams, including but not limited to companies like Retro Studios.

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Last week I met with Shigeru Miyamoto, one of Nintendo's key executives and the general manager of all the publisher's internal development. Our discussion ranged from Pikmin 3 to Mario to F-Zero, but as we touched upon different franchises, Miyamoto repeatedly touched upon a common theme: Nintendo must directly oversee any project involving its brands, and if it must increase the size of its teams around the world, so be it."[We've] been working on what we can do to increase our internal staff in a way that will allow us to have more projects going at the same time," Miyamoto said, when I had asked him about why some franchises like Wave Race and F-Zero seem trapped in past generations. Miyamoto noted that an increase in size will allow Nintendo to not only create new games but watch over older IPs that fans clearly still want.Miyamoto brought up two different examples of this during our discussion. He mentioned that he's been working with Yoshiaki Koizumi, one of the lead developers at Nintendo's EAD Tokyo studio and producer of Super Mario 3D Land and 3D World, "on what we can do to allow the Tokyo studio to create more games." Miyamoto noted that Nintendo had already started to "gradually" increase that studio's team over time. "We're doing this not by going out of house to different companies and having them develop games for us, but instead by working with partner companies and subsidiaries in a way that allows the Tokyo studio to run more projects," Miyamoto said.Fans have certainly seen that trend emerge over the past few years. We've seen less projects handled directly by third parties like Capcom or Square, and more produced by closer development teams like Next Level or Retro Studios. In fact, in response to many fans asking why Retro is working on Donkey Kong With third party support across the 3DS and Wii U struggling to approach anemic, Nintendo's own development efforts are in more demand than ever. I asked Miyamoto why Nintendo has been shifting its thinking and leaning more on its own teams."In the past, we had what we called the collaboration projects, which were sort of like an outside company almost doing a cover of our games with their own studios. The determination that we’ve come to more recently is that we prefer to have an internal Nintendo producer who’s there to oversee any outside development work that’s happening, to make sure that it’s in line with what we expect out of our games," Miyamoto said. "I guess in one sense, some of those outside companies that we worked with, they also have a tendency to continue to work on the same projects over time. They tend to look more like internal companies or internal partners than they really actually are."To be clear, Nintendo isn't putting all of its development focus squarely on its internal teams in Kyoto and Tokyo, Japan. As mentioned above, it remains committed to several partners and subsidiaries like Retro and Next Level. "The development style that we have with those companies is much closer to our own internal development style. It allows us to expand our resources."Every interview with Shigeru Miyamoto goes by in the blink of an eye, and every question asked begs dozens more, but Nintendo's emerging yet existing development strategy has endless implications. Nintendo is focusing on internally-driven development at a time when it needs more software support than ever. That's simply a fascinating choice to make. It speaks to the publisher's belief that its commitment to quality and its specific view of game design is paramount, even when that commitment results in delays or gaps in releases. By Nintendo's own admission, it must drive the change in Wii U's momentum in order to regain the support of third parties as well as the general gaming public. Can it retain its current development strategy, expand its teams, and almost single-handedly drive sales of two separate gaming platforms? That's a very tall order, and we'll know sooner rather than later.

Rich is an Executive Editor at IGN , and watches over news, features, Assassin's Creed, WWE, Resident Evil and Nintendo content. So many things. So many! Chat with Rich about any of those things - or anything else - on Twitter @RichIGN