When the face of NIntendo's indie program, Dan Adelman, left the company back in early August, more than a few concerned fans wondered if his departure would have a noticeable effect on the company's indie outreach. To everyone's relief, Nintendo's attention towards smaller studios has never been better. Nintendo is even sponsoring the Indie Game Revolution exhibit that launched this past weekend at Seattle's EMP Museum.
In attendance at EMP were Damon Baker and David Warden, Nintendo of America's senior licensing marketing manager and director of marketing and analytics, respectively. Gamasutra was able to interview the two men and ask about where the eShop is heading and how indies can interface with Nintendo. A lot of this information has been shared in various interviews and presentations in the past, but it's good to keep readers constantly abreast of Nintendo's policies and processes.
In addition to attending events like IndieCade, where Baker and Warden invited developers to deliver three-minute presentations one after the other for two hours, they encourage anybody to walk right up to them and bring new game ideas to their attention. They try to keep an open-door policy, since there's always an audience for any weird idea, and this commitment has led to Nintendo's selling as much software on eShop as in most major retailers.
There are a couple of restrictions on that open-door policy, however. One is potentially controversial content, although Baker says that, in such situations, "we would always rather have an up-front conversation with the developers about that early on in the process rather than waiting until the last minute to find out about that." Consider the case of The Binding of Isaac, for example — it was preventing from launching on 3DS, but now it seems that it will be allowed on Wii U. It's clear that Nintendo is easing up in this department.
The other no-no is advergaming, such as Yaris or the Burger King titles on Xbox 360. I don't think anyone is sweating about such games not appearing on Nintendo machines, however.
Nintendo may not have a Pub Fund like Sony does, which gives promising devs full financial support to complete their projects. Nonetheless, the company goes out of its way to offer support in other ways, whether through extensive promotion, demonstrating how certatin development tools could best be employed, and so on. There is a dev kit loaner program, though. As Baker explained:
We actually have a program where we can — I don't know what the term is for it, but basically we will allocate dev units, and then you can pay us back after a year. It's like a one-year loaner program. That gives developers enough time to actually finish their game, get it launched, start making some money, and then they have to pay it back. But the dev kits aren't actually that expensive. They're the price of like, a high-end PC, basically.
You can read more about Nintendo's extensive indie efforts on Gamasutra.
