And System Warriors, your Sheep King charizard1605 is here to educate you some more.
Just earlier today, there was some misinformation about Nintendo's stance towards indie developers, which admittedly has been supremely poor in the past. However, Nintendo have turned over a new leafe with the eShop, and would you look at that, today, Gamasutra posted an interview that outlines just this new stance. Some choice excerpts for you:
GS: In the past, you've required developers to have an office, but many indies work from home or are individuals. Is this policy changing?
DA: So that second requirement -- the ability to keep confidential materials secure -- was originally defined in terms of an office that was separate from the home. Back when that rule was created, that seemed to be an appropriate way of defining things.
As you point out, more and more people are working from home, and we recognize that developers are forming virtual teams around the world. I know we've shied away from talking about these things publicly in the past, so I'm glad that I can officially confirm that the office requirement is a thing of the past.
GS: I've heard from developers that to publish on your services, they need an address in the territory in question, for example a Japanese address. I've even heard that Canadian developers need a U.S. address to publish in the U.S. Can you explain what's going on here?
Anyone from any country can make their games available on the eShop within the NOA and NOE region -- i.e., pretty much everywhere outside of Japan.
GS: Steam is the obvious market leader here. Developers are used to Valve's functionality, like sales, preorders, preloads, and painless patching. Can you talk about your plans around these four aspects of your service?
DA:Â Developers set their own pricing for their Wii U and Nintendo 3DS content. As one example, Little Inferno launched at $14.99. They did a sale for $9.99, and it went so well, they decided to make that price change permanent. It's completely in their control.
Updating games is also fairly straightforward. If they find an issue they need to fix, they can. In terms of other Nintendo eShop functionality, there's a dedicated team working through a roadmap of new features. We'll be able to announce those as they get closer to release.
GS: What kind of outreach are you doing on the tools side, since Nintendo platforms require custom dev kits?
DA: Dev kits are actually not all that expensive. They're about the price of a high-end PC. Nothing that should be a showstopper for anyone.
There are a number of really exciting things going on in this space right now. We recently announced that we're providing Unity Pro 4 for Wii U to licensed developers at no added cost. So if a developer is currently working on a game in Unity and has a Wii U dev kit, it should be super easy to bring that game over to the Wii U console -- and not just do a straight port but also take advantage of any features of the console they want, like motion controls, Miiverse or of course the second-screen GamePad controller. Or vice versa -- making a game for Wii U and then going to other platforms should also be seamless.
In addition, at GDC we're going to be talking about some new tools we're rolling out for developers to use HTML5 and JavaScript to make games. The thing I'm most excited about for this is how easy it is to prototype new game ideas to find the fun quickly and easily.
Openly courting indie developers, lowering barriers for entry, reducing royalties, working with them and assisting them with development tools, giving them complete control over the price, working with them to improve the eShop's layout, not charging them for patches... looks like Nintendo really did learn from WiiWare and DSiWare. It seems to have a great indie developer policy now, one that seems to mirror Sony's indie friendly stance, and seems to be miles ahead of Microsoft's sh*tty indie policies.
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