Nintendo talks indies on Switch – quality over quantity, focusing on new games, more
Gamasutra published a new interview with Damon Baker, head of partner management at Nintendo of America. Baker hosted the company’s Switch Nindies Showcase presentation earlier this week. During the chat, Baker talked about how Nintendo is focusing on quality over quantity and targeting newer games as opposed to ports with smaller developers.
We’ve rounded up some excerpts from the interview below. You can read Gamasutra’s full piece here.
On how “selectivity” is the key word right now in terms of partnerships with smaller devs…
“The bigger difference between the launch of Wii U and the launch of Switch is that we realized with the Wii U, it was more of a quantity over quality mentality. It was more about ‘let’s get as much content out there as possible.’”
“Right now we are being very selective about who we’re letting into the development environment, and through our portal. Whereas with the Wii U and 3DS, we opened that up to everybody. I think our mentality was to cast that big net, [but] you’d never know when the next great piece of content was coming, or where it was gonna come from, or where it was going to permeate. This time around, we’re going to be a lot more conservative. We don’t want to open up the floodgates quite yet.”
On how developers didn’t quite “get” what Wii U was supposed to be…
“We also had a bunch of experimentation going on with the [Wii U] hardware. There were a ton of really cool features with Wii U, but no one really knew which won they were supposed to latch onto, or which one they’re supposed to sink their teeth into. In the end, the defining feature was off-TV mode.”
On how there’s a lot of interest among devs, but Nintendo is generally more interested in games that haven’t been on other consoles yet…
“We want to honor our fans by making sure we’ve got original content, that we’re forward-looking rather than backwards. That’s not to say that there aren’t ports or other great content that have come out in the past couple or few years that wouldn’t work perfect on Switch. It’s just not a priority for right now.”
On how Nintendo is still open to pitches…
“I don’t know if people have noticed as much, but we definitely have been attending all the developer conferences, all of the trade shows. We’ve been proactive in establishing relationships with developers and publishers across the board.
“It hasn’t happened overnight. It’s taken the last few years to focus efforts there. And now we’re starting to see some of those relationships turn into actual products. We’ll continue to drive those relationships as well, but we’re certainly open to more content or opportunities. We’re just telling publishers and developers to reach out to us if they haven’t heard for us already. And if they’ve got a pitch for the perfect content for Nintendo Switch, we definitely want to hear about it.”
