ZeNfA Productions on how the Nindies Love You sale came to be, wants similar promotions in the future
Several developers partnered together to host a “Nindies Love You” sale on the eShop today. 50 percent discounts are live for a number of Wii U and 3DS games in North America, Europe, and Australia.
The campaign started with an idea from Greg Wiggleton, the founder of ZeNfA Productions. In an interview with Nintendo Life, Wiggleton explained how it came about:
I truly had the idea for this group event sale around a year ago when the 1st and 2nd “epic indie sale” events were happening. I was curious if it was possible to host my own type of sale with other indies I’m in contact with and if Nintendo would advertise it on the eShop at all. It was around August 2015 that I finally started to get active in recruiting other Nintendo indies and contacting Nintendo directly about setting up one of these sales.
The very 1st step I took was taking charge of this idea and contacting Nintendo (already with a few select indies interested) back around August 2015. I was curious on how these group sales came into being. Nintendo would go on to tell me that these group indie sales were 100% created from indies and that Nintendo just helped set it up with the indies being in charge of it. From there I tried to gather a bunch of different indie Wii U games that would go well with this sale and show Nintendo that we were interested in doing our own sale. From here, I would go on to be Nintendo’s main contact for our group and talk to Nintendo on what is required, type of banners needed, and deadlines for different parts were. Every few weeks I would send updates to all involved as well as keep Nintendo involved with our developments to help keep them informed that we were serious about doing this sale.
The original goal was to have this 2 week sale period occur sometime around Christmas of 2015. A few of us involved early on thought this might be a good idea. After all, the Christmas period can be very nice for sales. However, a problem with this plan was that this period is usually very crowded. Nintendo themselves even warned us that a sale like this in December was a bad idea and recommended January or February for doing this sale. By October we finally decided to officially make it a February sale. Since this would take place around Valentine’s, we decided on that as a theme and came up with the “Nindies Love You” title for it.
As for another promotion like Nindies Love You, Wiggleton is very much interested in making that happen.
I would love to create new promotions like this in the future. I am hopeful that this event goes well for all involved so that we can all continue to make interesting and fun games for Nintendo systems for all to enjoy. Who knows, maybe one day you might see a similar promotion by me for the Nintendo NX for a new set of games!
