Nintendo to be “a lot more conservative” about letting indies on Switch
Getting on the Wii U as an indie developer was really quite easy. The downside of that was there were a number of effort titles on the system, just real crap. Things are going to be different with the Switch.
Damon Baker who you may remember from the Nindies showcase early last week has told Gamasutra that Nintendo is going to a little more selective with who they let on the eShop on Switch.
Baker says that Nintendo will eventually ‘open up the floodgates’ but for now;
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.”
What do you think, should Nintendo let anyone and everyone on?
Good riddance. There was so much toxic crap being sprayed all over the 3DS and Wii U eShop that this approach is most welcome.
I’m all for a curated store. Take a look at the App Store or Steam for an example of what goes wrong where quality is not a deciding factor. That said, there’s a fine line between curation and dictation. What you don’t want is for amazing experiences being rejected because the curator was having a bad day or didn’t “get” the game.
On the flip side, if they’re limiting developer access BEFORE they get the dev kit that could also be an issue because I’m sure a lot people could come up with great ideas just by having access to the hardware and SDK to tinker. I’d love to have a dev kit to play around with because mucking around without a definitive goal often produces quirky ideas and inspiration.