[SkeuomorphicBee]

> coupled with relatively experienced engineers

I disagree. Nintendo has good engineers but so does many of the other studios. For me what sets Nintendo apart is not their code or technology, but their game design and game direction. The way they seem to craft their game-play and game mechanics to have everything it needs but nothing more, and then couple it with the perfect match for game aesthetics with unmatched consistency.

[ska]

Do Nintendo keep their teams together longer?

You usually can’t get a great engineering team by throwing a bunch of good engineers together, it takes time and work.

I don’t know much about the game industry but from what little I have heard it seems there is a lot of churn.

[tjpnz]

This is a Japanese company so most of their engineers will be hired directly from university and typically stay on until retirement. Based on what I've heard they build large groups of engineers who'll stay together more or less permanently. Then they'll rotate these groups between different projects. Sometimes they'll be on a game, other times they might be doing something with hardware. So the groups end up multidisciplinary.

[ska]

That’s basically ideal for a lot of engineering work, so long as you keep fresh ideas coming into the group somehow so it doesn’t stagnate …