Former Nintendo staffers explain why Nintendo ditched the “Nindies” name

Do you remember the “Nindies” term that Nintendo used to bring up on a regular basis? It was very prominent in the Wii U / 3DS era, and even the very early Nintendo Switch days. You probably don’t need us to tell you what it was for, but essentially it was an easy way to label indie games on Nintendo platforms.

These days, “Nindies” is all but forgotten. So what happened to the name? During a recent podcast episode, former Nintendo of America employees Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang spoke about the situation.

All of this simply comes down to legal concerns, so it didn’t have anything to do with developers not liking Nindies. Despite a lot of positivity surrounding the term, Nintendo’s legal team took issue with it. According to Yang, if there were to be a legal dispute, it would become more difficult to defend the brand.

Ellis and Yang shared the following:

Kit: It was created by that team – the PDR team – and they they ran with it and they did as much as they could with it and everybody loved it. They made t-shirts… they made a logo. They made all this, but they got the tap on the shoulder from the legal team like, “You can’t do this.”

Krysta: You can’t do that because you’re not supposed to combine the brand word.

Kit: It was like Wiimote.

Krysta: Yeah, Wiimote was bad. You can’t say Wiimote. Wii Remote. And definitely cannot like kind of cut the Nintendo brand in half and tack it to another word. It dilutes the brand – in the words of legal – making it so that you cannot defend your brand later on for some sort of legal dispute.

Kit: Speaking of disputing, the PDR team did dispute it. Remember the guy who came up with this and he was really like the champion of it? He was kind of a pit bull and he went toe-to-toe with legal but guess what? You can’t. You can’t beat that.

Despite what was mentioned above, Nintendo does have internal things that do something similar to Nindies. For example, the company makes use of the terms Nsite and Nbassador – though again, these aren’t public facing terms.