ElFly said:
No, the upfront cash thing is 100% Nintendo being assholes. That's undefensible.
He never asked about the upfront cash thing.
Htown said:
Are numbers 1 and 2 related? I mean I guess carts take longer to make than discs, and everything other than DS is using disc-based media right now, so that could account for the increased turn around time.
Is that also the case with the first problem? Maybe because of the way Nintendo's manufacturing is set up, it doesn't make financial sense to do an extra run of carts for your game unless you're doing X thousand units? I don't know how the heck this works, is that a reasonable or unreasonable assumption?
It's a reasonable enough assumption simply because of the volumes that they're producing. Their manufacturing processes are set up to produce
millions of cartridges at a time and are probably running day and night to maximise throughput.
All print runs necessitate some downtime while things are reconfigured to produce cartridges for a that title. This downtime is probably the same (or very similar) for all print runs, big or small. Because downtime is time that your machines aren't producing output, this means that each one costs you a certain amount of money (opportunity cost), so it is in your best interests to make sure downtimes are reduced as much as possible.
By mandating that minimum orders are X amount, you in effect minimise your downtime on your machines or limit it to a given value so that you're not so bogged down in small orders that you can't meet the big (high value) ones. It isn't unusual for plants that are set up to produce in volume.
This isn't a case of Nintendo being selfish douchebags, it's a case of them being a manufacturer doing robust business.
Of course, I'm making the assumption here that unlike the book industry, publishers don't actually
physically publish their own games, but rather bankroll devs and pay Nintendo to do print runs for their titles.