Last August, Dan Adelman announced that he had left his position as Head of Digital Content and Development for Nintendo of America. As the "indie man" at Nintendo, he helped establish the WiiWare, DSiWare, and eShop services, as well as sought out content makers to produce software on said services. He's now an indie business consultant, and his current project is the Metroidvania Axiom Verge.
Nintendo blogger Emily Rogers had an opportunity to catch up with Adelman and ask him many burning questions that fans have often asked Nintendo but never received answers to. Specifically, the topics ranged from third-party relations and Virtual Console strategy to Nintendo of America's lack of autonomy.
He suggests that Nintendo needs to work more directly with outside developers in order to get their games on Nintendo systems:
Sony and Microsoft spend a lot of money securing exclusives — or at least exclusive features — on the top games and since Nintendo doesn't really do that, third parties focus on the other systems. I'm not sure about Sony, but I know Microsoft also has a team of technical people that will go work with a studio for a few weeks or even months to help them make their games as good as they can be on those platforms.
Trying to push more progressive policies through upper management was quite the challenge, often resulting in the company simply staying the course:
Nintendo is not only a Japanese company, it is a Kyoto-based company. For people who aren't familiar, Kyoto-based are to Japanese companies as Japanese companies are to US companies. They're very traditional, and very focused on hierarchy and group decision making. Unfortunately, that creates a culture where everyone is an advisor and no one is a decision maker — but almost everyone has veto power.
As for the drip-feed Virtual Console release plan that sees only one or two games released a week, it's done that way simply because it's the most effective strategy:
It gave people a reason to come back every week and see what was new. It also gave people some time to consider each game individually. If Nintendo were to dump 300 games on the eShop today, there might be a classic from your childhood that you had simply forgotten about and didn't even think of sifting through all of the games to look for. If there is a small number of games each week, there's a greater likelihood that people will notice the games and resurface their old memories.
Read the whole interview at Dromble to hear Adelman's brain get picked further.
