Absolutely amazing thread, as per usual.
Factor 5 and Silicon Knights both appear to have followed similar trajectories after separating from Nintendo. Both studios jumped ship after learning of the Wii, acquired exclusive contracts for multiple games with one of the HD console manufacturers, released one game of dubious quality and poor sales, floundered and died. And both attempted a last-ditch effort of getting a game published by Nintendo prior to their eventual collapse.
To be fair, quite a few mid-tier developers unaffiliated with Nintendo suffered similar fates during the course of this generation.
Left Field Productions continues on though, making budget extreme sports titles. I wonder how many of the developers that created the N64 sports titles (NBA Courtside, Excitebike 64) still remain at the studio.
I think it would be nice to see "Internal Team Structural Changes at Square/Square Enix [Since The Merger / Since FFXI] and Effect on Quality of Output" or something to that nature.
Great thread, mama robotnik!
While I would love to see this as well, researching such a topic might be difficult without being able to read Japanese.