Gamaustra recently reported that Nintendo now owns the developer Nd Cube, the developers of the new Wii game, Wii Party. I thought this was interesting because Nintendo never owned Hudson (they're owned by Konami), and Hudson made all the Mario Party games. The Mario Party games came out almost every year, and there were three on the Nintendo 64 and four on the GameCube. However, there was only one on the Wii, Mario Party 8, in 2007. Even though it was the most successful game of the entire franchise, there hasn't been a Mario Party on a console since.
Then Nd Cube recently released Wii Party in Japan, basically picking up the torch but using Miis instead of characters from the Mario series. Now Nintendo has bought the whole developer, and then a few members of the Mario Party team at Hudson quit Hudson to join Nd Cube. So now Nintendo completely owns a company that has devs from both Mario Party and Wii Party, basically making the ultimate casual party board game team. I don't usually expect such a niche genre to have an all-star development team like that.
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