Damon Baker and David Warden talk all about Nintendo’s indie efforts

Gamasutra has published a huge interview with Damon Baker and David Warden from Nintendo to talk about the company’s indie program. We’ve pulled out some of the responses below. For the full discussion, check out the full interview here.

On the status of Nintendo’s indie program following Dan Adelman…

Damon Baker: Dan was working in our department and we’re still really close with him. He’s doing a great job on his own thing, and we’re going to continue to work with him in the future, so that’s exciting.

In terms of what has changed since, not a lot has changed, because I think he was more of a face for our indie community and our relationship with those developers, but it’s always been a team effort in the organization — whether working with David and his team on eShop and data collection, or working with other departments.

We bring the content through, from an operations standpoint. We have a business development division. We have a marketing division as well. So it’s always been a bunch of people that have been involved in that.

And so, at least right now, we haven’t filled his position, but we have all hands on deck that are answering questions, that are giving advice on what great content they’re seeing. It’s almost more like a committee basis at this point, at least in terms of how we’re working with the independent community.

On how Nintendo gets games on its platforms…

DB: It’s absolutely both. They’re really passionate developers who grew up with Nintendo platforms and they’ve always had a vision of their games on a Nintendo platform, so they’re very proactive about reaching out to us, and we direct them to the developer website and get them signed up as quickly as possible, so they can then get a development kit and get on their way.

Additionally, we are proactive, ourselves, in going to different trade shows and going to different indie meetups and shows, and seeing what type of content is out there, and hearing the buzz that is going on, online, in terms of what we should be paying attention to and what we should be going after.

So it’s a bit of both.

On how Nintendo reached out to devs at IndieCade…

DB: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Because the first day of IndieCade, they had the IndieXchange, which are the classroom sessions. So we did a presentation, a bit of a background on how to become a developer, and our self-publishing business, the tools that are available — things like Unity and the Nintendo Web Framework, which is basically HTML5 and Java support.

We did some tech demos and live demonstrations of how easy it is to bring content over to the Web Framework, in front of the crowd, so that was pretty cool to be able to do that.

And then we did have the speed dating and the different sessions where people can come to us and pitch their game ideas and concepts, and just get information on how to get started. So it was a busy day. I think we were booked from 9 until 4:30, with meetings every 15 minutes, with the indie developers. And them from 4:30 to 6:30, we had three-minute meetings that were packed back-to-back.

On whether Nintendo funds indie games…

DB: No. We don’t have a Pub Fund type of thing. Really, our point of differentiation is on the relationships that we build with those guys. We invest a lot of time and energy and internal resources supporting these guys.

A lot of independent developers are amazing coders, and amazing at bringing experiences to life, but they may not be as familiar with how to market their game, or how to promote it, or how to take that to the next level. So we put in a lot of resources there to kind of hold their hands and show them examples of how they can make the most of it, and they can then use those tools for all of their future releases as well, regardless of platform.

On whether indies can sustain themselves by developing for Nintendo platforms exclusively…

DB: I think it depends on the experience and the level of investment that they’re putting into it in the first place. But from what we’ve seen, we’ve got a range of sizes of teams, with development teams: Indie developers, from one or two-person teams to anywhere from 25 to 30-person teams. And they all have varying levels of success based on the revenue and what it is that they’re getting out of the shop.

So I think it really depends on a number of factors, in terms of how much money and how much energy they’re putting into it on the front end, and what is that return. But we’re seeing a lot of developers that are doing a fantastic job on the shop.

DW: And I’ll say that we’ve seen a fundamental difference over the last couple years in our consumers’ interaction with the eShop. The eShop is now one of Nintendo’s top retailers. We sell as much software as some of the major chain stores through the eShop.

Our consumers expect to be able to buy digital content on our platforms and are voting with their dollars in favor of digital content in a big, big way. It’s been a dramatic shift over the last couple of years, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. There are certainly examples of individual titles that have done really well. But as a category, the audience is there and they’re willing to spend money. The eShop has just grown a tremendous amount.

DB: I think the message is, we don’t want to send out an assumption that if you bring out content on the eShop that you’re automatically entitled to success. Any developer has to put in the effort on their side; they have go out there and promote their own game, market it. They have to create their own success. But we’re there to help amplify that.

DW: And it is easier, in some ways, to stand out on our platform, because of the way we do merchandising. Because of the way we present content, it is easier for some of these indies to get traction with us and with our audiences, for sure.

On the percentage of users who have the systems purchase download content…

DW: Yeah. A couple of things; first off, I mentioned this earlier, but we’re seeing every new console that we sell connected within a couple days, and a majority of those folks will come into the eShop at some point. And people use the eShop for a variety of things: They use it for demos and videos and for games, but we’re seeing a high percentage of the audience, of every one of our console owners, come into the eShop for different reasons.

The percentage of revenue and percentage of sales of our titles, which you’ve alluded to, has grown. Again, 20 percent of Smash Bros. sales is through the eShop and, as I said, it’s even higher on some of our titles. And our unit sales and revenue from 2013 to 2014 was about 200 percent growth. So, I’m not going to get into specific figures per se, but we expect that kind of growth to keep going in 2015.

DB: I think Nintendo has already released a lot of first-party content as dual-distribution titles, and depending on the type of game it is and the genre it is, I think some of those are much more prone to being digitally downloaded, just to keep it on your system.

On the success of DLC…

DW: And for a lot of these things, you’re seeing that we’re producing DLC for these games: Mario Kart, Fantasy Life has some as well. Hyrule Warriors has DLC, and the DLC is very successful. We’re seeing very high attach rates for DLC on our platforms as well.

On extending the ability to buy/download games off-device to third-party content (not directly on the eShop, such as through Nintendo’s website)…

DW: We’re going to keep working on expanding that functionality as much as we possibly can. Of course, we want our entire library to be available that way, whether it’s first party or third party.

On whether anything ever gets shut down…

DB: It has, in the past. There has been questionable content — things that are very, very controversial. Nintendo is sensitive to that. But I think what we always encourage is, we would always rather have an up-front conversation with the developers about that early on in the process rather than waiting until the last minute to find out about that. So if a developer has something that they know they’re putting something questionable in there, or not, then it’s better to have that conversation so we can, at least, guide them through it correctly.