Reggie: Nintendo loves indies
Indies have become a prominent force in the gaming industry, especially over the past few months. On Nintendo’s end, the company is recognizing smaller developers more than ever on Wii U and 3DS.
Speaking with IGN, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime discussed how working with indies is a big priority for Nintendo:
“The independent developer, especially those developers who have experience, who’ve shown real capabilities, we love those independent developers. And what we’re doing is creating even more of an infrastructure for a brand-new independent developer, someone who’s never created content before, to be effective on our platform. So it’s an area that we’re spending a lot more time and a lot more energy to create the infrastructure to help these developers publish their content and be effective. It’s something that we have had to learn how to do. Because our systems aren’t straightforward for a developer who hasn’t had a lot of experience.”
Reggie went on to talk about what Nintendo is doing to give indies the necessary tools to bring their games to the eShop:
“First, you want the tools to be able to create your content and bring it onto the system. That’s why we’ve announced the relationship with Unity. That’s why we’ve created the Nintendo Web Framework. Again, we’ve taken steps on the development side to make our system independent-friendly. Second thing we’ve done is we’ve created the merchandising capabilities, right? So when you’re on the eShop, how we promote and merchandise content.”
“You’ll see that we’re merchandising indies’ content right alongside our content. There’s no separate area. There’s no challenge of discovery to find this content. That’s what the independent developers really love, because they know that consumers are going to the eShop looking for. If there’s a value program for some Virtual Console content, or if we’ve re-released a new piece of content, and right alongside that is going to be indies’ content. They love that.”
