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Nnooo says 3DS eShop has helped DSiWare sales 'a lot', hope same can happen for WiiWare to Wii U
A portion of an Aussie-Gamer interview with Nic and Bruce from Nnooo...
Aussie-Gamer – Since the Nintendo 3DS was released, have you found the eShop has helped with the sales of your older DSi titles?
Nic: A lot! A lot of people sort of laugh at us and think it’s highly amusing, but our Notebook titles which are really boring and not sexy since they’re more applications than games, have been amazing sellers. They are by far the best business decision we have ever made.
The MyNotebook titles have sold way in advance of over 200,000 units. It’s been really good, but we’ve put some hard work into it as well. Nintendo did an awful lot of apps on DSi – they did their calculators and their alarm clocks and I saw them coming online and thought “okay, if Nintendo are okay with doing applications, maybe we should try too!”
And so the nice thing is, because Nintendo want to sell their own stuff, they created an Application section in the eShop and we were lucky enough because we were making applications we get featured alongside their applications as well. And because that’s a permanent feature of the store – or it has been so far – it means for a while we basically had fairly steady sales.
Bruce: We’re currently selling more of our DSiWare “MyLife Collected” apps on Nintendo 3DS than we are on Nintendo DSi. So that’s one of the reasons we felt we were able to continue with Spirit Hunters Inc. for DSiWare; we know that people are still buying DSiWare titles on their Nintendo 3DS.
Nic: Obviously if it were a 3D game I think the potential for sales would be a little bit higher – that’s my main worry – but then, I bought a DSiWare title the other day that I was absolutely addicted to for about 24 hours and then completed.
Bruce: And we’ve got really striking graphics for Spirit Hunters Inc. Light Version and Shadow Version so it should be noticeable on the eShop! And Nintendo are quite excited about it, too which is good because we really have to try and persuade them to put it on the front page of the eShop. Even though it’s a DSiWare title, it’s not a “weak” DSiWare title – as you said, it’s a retail experience in a downloadable form.
Nic: Personally I think the way Nintendo has handled the transition between Nintendo DSiWare and Nintendo 3DS downloadable games has been done amazingly well. You have the whole DS and the way the DS transitioned into having its own online store and that has now transitioned to the Nintendo 3DS with its own online store — the fact that you’ve just got this huge volume of content both in cartridge form and all the DSiWare that can just move over.
Obviously, when they launched the 3DS, they can’t pump out enough development kits for every developer in the world, particularly the likes of us — we’re way down in the food chain because of EA and Ubisoft; they need them for the launch titles and cartridge games that are going to sell a lot more. So having that buffer of transition of all this great DSiWare moving over while they can start to push out the dev kits to the second and third tier developers like ourselves so we can start making more indie eShop titles, at least you’ve got that buffer and I think it’s been great.
Although the Wii has maybe died a lot quicker, I’m really hopeful that for the Wii U they really push a lot of the WiiWare titles out onto Wii U.
And I imagine that we’ll face the same problem again where we’ve got the Wii U dev kits in the office, but there’s not going to be a lot of people pushing out Wii U eShop content right from day one. Although, they are saying that a lot of the retail titles you’ll be able to download straight away, which is really interesting.
Bruce: Which is great — we just moved apartments early in the year and we’re trying to get rid of all our physical stuff now, so all my 3DS software I’m just buying as download now. I really like it.
Nic: I need to buy a new memory card for my Vita. I have so many games, PSP games and download games, and they keep giving me freebies on PlayStation Plus (laughs).
Full interview here
Aussie-Gamer – Since the Nintendo 3DS was released, have you found the eShop has helped with the sales of your older DSi titles?
Nic: A lot! A lot of people sort of laugh at us and think it’s highly amusing, but our Notebook titles which are really boring and not sexy since they’re more applications than games, have been amazing sellers. They are by far the best business decision we have ever made.
The MyNotebook titles have sold way in advance of over 200,000 units. It’s been really good, but we’ve put some hard work into it as well. Nintendo did an awful lot of apps on DSi – they did their calculators and their alarm clocks and I saw them coming online and thought “okay, if Nintendo are okay with doing applications, maybe we should try too!”
And so the nice thing is, because Nintendo want to sell their own stuff, they created an Application section in the eShop and we were lucky enough because we were making applications we get featured alongside their applications as well. And because that’s a permanent feature of the store – or it has been so far – it means for a while we basically had fairly steady sales.
Bruce: We’re currently selling more of our DSiWare “MyLife Collected” apps on Nintendo 3DS than we are on Nintendo DSi. So that’s one of the reasons we felt we were able to continue with Spirit Hunters Inc. for DSiWare; we know that people are still buying DSiWare titles on their Nintendo 3DS.
Nic: Obviously if it were a 3D game I think the potential for sales would be a little bit higher – that’s my main worry – but then, I bought a DSiWare title the other day that I was absolutely addicted to for about 24 hours and then completed.
Bruce: And we’ve got really striking graphics for Spirit Hunters Inc. Light Version and Shadow Version so it should be noticeable on the eShop! And Nintendo are quite excited about it, too which is good because we really have to try and persuade them to put it on the front page of the eShop. Even though it’s a DSiWare title, it’s not a “weak” DSiWare title – as you said, it’s a retail experience in a downloadable form.
Nic: Personally I think the way Nintendo has handled the transition between Nintendo DSiWare and Nintendo 3DS downloadable games has been done amazingly well. You have the whole DS and the way the DS transitioned into having its own online store and that has now transitioned to the Nintendo 3DS with its own online store — the fact that you’ve just got this huge volume of content both in cartridge form and all the DSiWare that can just move over.
Obviously, when they launched the 3DS, they can’t pump out enough development kits for every developer in the world, particularly the likes of us — we’re way down in the food chain because of EA and Ubisoft; they need them for the launch titles and cartridge games that are going to sell a lot more. So having that buffer of transition of all this great DSiWare moving over while they can start to push out the dev kits to the second and third tier developers like ourselves so we can start making more indie eShop titles, at least you’ve got that buffer and I think it’s been great.
Although the Wii has maybe died a lot quicker, I’m really hopeful that for the Wii U they really push a lot of the WiiWare titles out onto Wii U.
And I imagine that we’ll face the same problem again where we’ve got the Wii U dev kits in the office, but there’s not going to be a lot of people pushing out Wii U eShop content right from day one. Although, they are saying that a lot of the retail titles you’ll be able to download straight away, which is really interesting.
Bruce: Which is great — we just moved apartments early in the year and we’re trying to get rid of all our physical stuff now, so all my 3DS software I’m just buying as download now. I really like it.
Nic: I need to buy a new memory card for my Vita. I have so many games, PSP games and download games, and they keep giving me freebies on PlayStation Plus (laughs).