Following gestures by Sony and Microsoft to include independent developers, Nintendo spends more time on its “independent-friendly” infrastructure.
Nintendo is reminding people that it is now on the side of independent game developers instead of throwing more hurdles their way. Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said Nintendo’s systems had not been straightforward for new developers, limiting the games made for Nintendo systems and what developers can do. Fils-Aime wants to provide more resources to independent developers to help them publish their content. Nintendo began by bringing the Unity Engine to the Wii U last year, a popular game engine recognized by the indie gaming community. Fils-Aime also pointed to the Nintendo Web Framework, a development environment for developing Wii U games in various languages, as an example of how Nintendo has shown themselves more open to independent games.
Making games independently isn’t a glamorous job, and it comes with both perks and downfalls when compared to big-name game companies. With a price cut for the Wii U, discussions of the console’s success, and now comments from Fils-Aime about making independent development a big priority, Nintendo is doing its best to market their console as desirable to both consumers and developers.
“Again, we’ve taken steps on the development side to make our system independent-friendly,” Fils-Aime said. “Second thing we’ve done is we’ve created the merchandising capabilities, right? [On the eShop] you’ll see that we’re merchandising indies’ content right alongside our content.”
Sony and Microsoft have both made steps to promote indie development for their systems. Earlier this week, Sony announced select indie titles would receive discounts on the PlayStation store from August 27th to September 2nd. Microsoft confirmed in July that the Xbox One will include self-publishing, and at Gamescom the company announced The Independent Developers @ Xbox Initiative. With all three companies marketing themselves to independent developers, just think of all the new and different games in store for us.
Source: IGN
