Nintendo letting devs set Wii U eShop prices, no payments for patches

In the past, Nintendo has had quite a bit of control over the pricing of indie titles on its digital stores. With Wii U, the situation has changed significantly.

Frozenbyte marketing manager Mikael Haveri says developers can choose their own pricing when it comes to indie games on the Wii U eShop:

“That’s what we love about the new eShop. We have the power to price our products as we please, with just some basic guidelines from the big guys. The step to this is purely from Nintendos’s side and they clearly see that [their] previous installments have not been up to par. We can set our own pricing and actually continuing on that by setting our own sales whenever we want. It is very close to what Apple and Steam are doing at the moment, and very indie friendly.”

Another encouraging piece of news concerns patching. According to Haveri, there aren’t any “basic payments for each patch”. That allows the studio to “update our game almost as much as we want.”

“They have pushed away all of the old methods that have been established before. Simply put they’ve told us that there are no basic payments for each patch (which were pretty high on most platforms) and that we can update our game almost as much as we want. For indie developers this is huge.”

You can find additional commentary from Haveri here.