does nintendo develop hardware for their own games

So, I’ve been messing around with this whole Nintendo thing, right? You know, the gaming giant. And I got to wondering, does Nintendo develop hardware for their own games? It’s a bit of a head-scratcher, to be honest.

First off, I started digging into whether Nintendo even makes money from its hardware. Turns out, yeah, they do! Unlike some other guys in the console game, Nintendo actually profits from selling the Switch. It’s kind of their bread and butter, you know? Most of their cash comes from selling those consoles.

Then I got curious about how they make their games. What tools do they use? I mean, you’d think a big company like Nintendo would have some fancy in-house game engine, right? But nope, from what I found, they’re one of the few big names that don’t. They might reuse some stuff from older games, but no dedicated engine.

Here’s the wild part

• They own a bunch of game developers and publishers—like, over a dozen as of 2023. Think Mario, Zelda, all those classics.
• So they’ve got the software side locked down.

But get this, for the actual game development, they use Unity and Unreal Engine. Pretty standard stuff, really. Plus, they do some native development, whatever that means. I guess it’s like using the basic tools that come with the system.

Now, I wanted to know more about how they organize all this. It’s like, where do developers even start? Turns out, they have this thing called the Nintendo Developer Portal. It’s like a central hub for everything development-related. They probably use their own in-house tools and engines there, all tailored to their “creative vision” as they call it.

And here’s a blast from the past: the old NES games? They were written in something called 6502 assembly language. Sounds complex, but compared to today’s stuff, it was apparently pretty simple. Just 53 instructions! Can you believe that?

So, to wrap it up, Nintendo is this massive company that makes both hardware and software. They profit from selling consoles, use common game engines, have a ton of developers under their wing, and have this whole developer portal thing. It’s like a well-oiled machine, pumping out games and consoles. And to think it all started with some simple assembly language way back when. Crazy, right?