In a new Gamasutra feature, indies speak out about developing games for the Wii U, suggesting that the company may be playing ball with them more than it has in the past.
Though the company recently recruited a new senior vice president to oversee its network business, Nintendo may have already thawed a bit when dealing with independent developers who want to put their games on the Wii U, some suggest.
"As a general rule, I think it helps to keep Nintendo in the loop on what your plans are, even if they can't help you out straight away," says Collin van Ginkel of Toki Tori 2 developer Two Tribes, which is preparing a version of the game for the Wii U. Communication helped him get a dev kit.
The Trine 2 developer Frozenbyte also reports a positive relationship. "We were a little cautious at first before spending time with the dev kits, but when we got them and got the game running, that gave us confidence to go forward properly. Nintendo has supported us very well throughout," says Joel Kinnunen.
Meanwhile, says Cloudberry Kingdom developer Pwnee Studios' Jordan Fisher, "Talking to Nintendo, we're excited about the changes they're bringing, but only time will tell how deeply Nintendo fans embrace the new marketplace" -- suggesting that Nintendo is getting the hang of feeding information back to its digital developers.
The full feature, which has quotes from Gaijin Games' Alex Neuse and Felix Bohatsch of Broken Rules, as well as other developers, is live now on Gamasutra.
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I think that it's more a matter of Nintendo rarely goes into something that has yet to be proven when the market goes in the same direction. This tends to be their thing, they are not the company that carves out on it's own when the undertaking is huge and it's a crowded space in the middle of a cycle.
At the time of launch, Xbox Live was very unproven... and quite risky. Microsoft strategy seemed to encompass betting the entire brand on it. Should xbox live had failed in some way that was major, Microsoft would likely walk away from it demeaning it a failure.
If anything, Nintendo has been observing since then (and given that the Wii was something of a joke when it came to online, why would they not), which gives you quite a bit of info over what one would need, how these systems would work, how popular they are, etc.
Granted, they didn't pull an about-face when it became clear that xbox live was becoming a thing. But I don't think that they wanted to change for one issue. It would disturbed there ability to execute something proper... Something that Sony has known all to well.