Nintendo says it needs to be more proactive in promoting indies, lowering barriers, improving discoverability, more
Polygon has gone live with a new interview featuring Nintendo of America’s Dan Adelman, manager of business development licensing, and Damon Baker, senior manager of licensing marketing. Both had a whole lot to say regarding the company’s indie efforts, policies, and and more. You can find all of their comments after the break.
Adelman saying Nintendo needs to do a better job of getting the message out when it comes to its approach to indies…
“We need to do a better job of getting our message out. We’ve learned a lot of lessons over the past five or six years, from the beginning of WiiWare, [when] we had some policies that really made it difficult for game developers to release games on our system.”
Adelman on how he’s constantly working with and talking to indies…
“Not a day goes by when I’m talking to a developer who might say, ‘Yeah, I’d love to release a game on a Nintendo system, but I work from home and I know you guys have this requirement to work out of an office.’ I’ll say, ‘Actually, we got rid of that.’ And that will be a big surprise. Or they’re working on a game in Unity, and say ‘I hear on consoles to release a Unity game … costs tens of thousand of dollars.’ Actually, we have a deal with Unity so we’ve covered the licensing fees for the entire platform. So it’s free for you to release on our system.”
Adelman on how Nintendo has lowered the barrier for indie devs to bring their games to eShop…
“And we’re not done with this initiative by any stretch. We really want to make it as close to frictionless as possible, [with a] really low cost of entry and a really smooth process. We’ve still got a ways to go. We’re a large company with a large bureaucracy…”
Adelman talking more about Binding of Isaac’s non-release on Nintendo platforms and what Nintendo doesn’t allow…
“Binding of Isaac is one example where we have a concept guideline about overly religious themes. Frankly, it kills me a little bit, because I love the game … and I love Edmund as a person. So it killed me that as we were reviewing the guidelines [we identified that] there’s one specifically about that. But in terms of violence or M-rated content, there’s actually [no restrictions there]. We don’t allow AO-rated content but that goes for our retail products as well as digital.”
Baker on promoting indies…
“We should be doing a more proactive job there. We have a lot of that presence, we’re just not as vocal about it. That’s on us. We need to be more proactive with … having presence at all the digital developer events, spreading the good word of Nintendo eShop and how to develop on our platforms.”
Baker on how discoverability (finding quality, indie-developed eShop content amidst marquee digital releases and Virtual Console titles) needs to continue to be addressed on the eShop…
“The Nintendo eShop is always a work in progress. We’re going to have off-device availability [through the web, phone and smart devices] for eShop sales at some point. All of us feel that discoverability is going to be increasingly more important. We’ve got a nice flow of content, but as we grow the amount of content, it’s going to be important that we find that holy grail solution of how we make discoverability a priority…”
Baker on Nintendo’s continued initiative on courting indies…
“(Courting indie developers and getting their content on Nintendo eShop) continues to be a Nintendo initiative and has been been for some time. This isn’t something that we’ve just decided needed to be a top priority for Nintendo. Dan has been working on self-publishing and has made that available to our partners for years. … I think our priorities right now are to just really educate those development partners that it’s to easier than ever before to make games for Nintendo platforms and to increase that awareness and visibility for all that quality content…”
