[Developer Musings] ‘A Flawed Paradise’: Three devs weigh in on the good and bad of Nintendo’s eShops

Martijn Reuvers – Two Tribes

Previous Works: Two Tribes has created Toki Tori and Toki Tori 2, RUSH, EDGE, and more.

Upcoming Games: The company is currently wrapping up Swords & Soldiers HD for the Wii U eShop and is developing a 2D shooter.

In 2008 we released our first self-published title named Toki Tori for WiiWare. We were very positive at the beginning, but we soon realized that things weren’t as good as we thought they were. For instance it was not possible at all to give any discounts on our titles. So here we are 6 years later and Toki Tori 1 is still available on WiiWare for 10 dollars whereas a much improved version has been released on the Wii U and is available for only 2 bucks. Neither could we update our titles. New content? Extra levels? New features? Not possible to release it! But by far the worst about WiiWare was that no-one knew about it. Nintendo made a lot of mistakes with promoting it and caused confusion. Like, who came up with the ‘brilliant’ idea to separate the shop and the information channel? If you wanted to buy a game, you had to go to a dedicated Nintendo Channel to look for information. But when you wanted to buy it, you had to leave the Nintendo Channel and launch the shop and buy it there. And when you actually bought a game, you had to wait for minutes and minutes looking at a pretty annoying Mario animation, because it wasn’t possible to download the game in the background. And to top it off; the Wii had very limited system space. So suppose you downloaded only a few games, chances were high that your Wii memory was full and that would mean that you had to delete one of your other games first. Obviously you didn’t want to do that as it wasn’t clear what would happen to the old ones. And did you have to repurchase the game again?. So it made people even more reluctant to buy new games, since they were afraid that they’d lose the old ones. It took years for Nintendo to realize this issue and to address it. I think when you look at all these issues; it isn’t a big surprise that WiiWare didn’t perform well.

Fortunately Nintendo did learn a lot from their WiiWare mistakes. The eShop is much better organized and structured. No more separate shop and information ‘apps’. All information is available in the eShop. Games are loaded in the background now and I believe they also solved the memory full problem with SD cards, though I’m not sure since I haven’t run into memory problems yet because of the larger memory size. Furthermore; Nintendo allows updates and price drops (permanent and temporary) and they are very active at promoting titles in their eShop. They talk a lot with developers for promotions and it is easy to reach out to them. In that respect it is a difference between day and night as compared to WiiWare.

Perfect?

There are some things though that I think are still worth improving upon. For starters the eShop UI. Currently there are way too many screens a user has to click through in order to actually purchase a game. On the App Store it is a single click with a confirmation. Also the shop is too slow in my opinion; pages sometimes take forever to load and a lot of times it doesn’t seem to register my “mouse-clicks”. Sometimes the buttons don’t load properly or I see a missing image where an interface element or my Mii avatar should be. Stuff like that makes the shop look like amateurism and I don’t understand why Nintendo hasn’t come up with a more solid version of the UI within the past 1,5 years now.

What I also miss is a review section in the shop. On the App Store I always read the comments of a game, before I make a purchase. Here I cannot find any written customer reviews on a game on the eShop. For that information I have to load up Miiverse (which takes a while) or I have to grab my phone and dig up some reviews on the internet. From a developer point of view it would also be interesting to see WHY someone gives you a lower rating. Feedback like that is very valuable to us.

Maintenance.

Currently there is no developer portal in which we can enter the information/screens etc for our games. This makes it cumbersome to make any changes and it is impossible to do them quickly. Suppose next week Toki Tori is celebrating his birthday and we want to celebrate it with a special banner for just a couple of days. Not possible if you don’t plan this in advance for weeks. This is in stark contrast with Steam and the App Store on which the developer is able to configure everything themselves from a web-based portal. Just a click on a button and it is live. Nintendo really could benefit from that “do it yourself” approach in my opinion.

But in general in very happy with the direction Nintendo is going with this and it sincerely hope they will address the aforementioned issues.

Nintendo Everything would like to thank Phil Gaskell, Brjann Sigurgeirsson, and Martijn Reuvers for their valuable insight and for taking the time to contribute to our feature.