Nintendo has generally been behind the times on their online policies for some time now. The Wii suffered from tiny maximum game sizes for example, and many of their previous policies regarding cartridges made it difficult for developers too. Thats all set to change with their new rules regarding the Wii U eShop and how it treats indie developers.
Mikael Haveri, a marketing manager over at Frozenbyte games (responsible for Trine 2 on the Wii U eShop), has had glowing praise for the way Nintendo are handling Indie developers, with free patching and letting them set their own prices.
[quote]”That’s what we love about the new eShop,” said Haveri. “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.”
“They have pushed away all of the old methods that have been established before,” Haveri said, “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.”[/quote]
This is a great step in the right direction for Nintendo. Seeing how Microsoft has in the past charged developers over $10,000 to put up a patch for a game on Xbox Live, the fact that Nintendo are doing it all for free is going to win a lot of fans in the Indie scene and hopefully transform the eShop into something truely spectacular.