The first game since 2005 with Princess Peach in the starring role launches on Switch on March 22. That’s not far from now. And while we have a demo for Princess Peach: Showtime and have seen plenty of trailers for it, we still don’t know who actually developed Showtime. Weirdly, when asked directly, Nintendo just said that people need to wait for the game to come out and check the credits.
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In June 2023, Nintendo revealed Princess Peach: Showtime. The new 2.5D platformer is the first game to star the character since the release of 2005’s Super Princess Peach for the Nintendo DS. However, this time around it looks like Peach is getting a bigger, better, and more fleshed-out adventure featuring multiple outfits and costumes she can swap between, giving her unique powers and new abilities. It looks great! But if you were curious as to what studio is responsible for developing Showtime, you’d have to do some data mining to figure that out.
As reported by Eurogamer on March 8, Nintendo isn’t willing to divulge what studio or team developed Princess Peach: Showtime. You wouldn’t expect a lot of secrecy around the basic question of “Who made the game?” and yet, this is the reply Eurogamer received from Nintendo when it inquired about the identity of the studio behind the upcoming Princess Peach adventure.
The development team will be credited in the game credits.
That’s it. Nintendo basically told the outlet (and anyone else who cares about the team behind the game) to quit asking and just wait for the game to be released. Then you can check for yourselves.
Kotaku has reached out to Nintendo for more information.
Good-Feel is the likely studio behind Showtime
Of course, players have already data mined the newly released demo—which dropped on March 6—and discovered that Good-Feel is the likely developer behind Showtime. This makes it even weirder that Nintendo is being so cagey about who made the game!
Good-Feel is a trusted third-party studio that Nintendo has worked with many times before. Good-Feel is the same studio behind the popular games Kirby’s Epic Yarn and Yoshi’s Crafted World. So why Nintendo is hiding this fact before launch is odd. I’d bet there are people who like those games and might be more inclined to check out Showtime if they knew the pedigree behind the upcoming Peach title. But nope!
This is similar to a situation last year involving Super Mario Wonder. People were curious about who the new voice actor for Mario would be in the platformer. It was a big deal! This person was replacing Charles Martinet, the longtime voice of Mario. And when asked about the new actor, Nintendo once again told people to wait for the credits.
While some fans have done the mental gymnastics required to defend this strange level of opaqueness, the reality is that this is just Nintendo doing whatever it wants because it can. And it’s a shame that a bunch of talented devs can’t freely talk about the game they’ve spent years making until it was officially out. Seems like a shitty way to treat the people who make your games.
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