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Nintendo - indie F2P games coming, huge indie dev response
A portion of a GameSpot interview with Nintendo's Dan Adelman...
GS: Going off that, do you fully support free-to-play and episodic and things that people haven't even thought about yet? How flexible are you to going back and looking at your policy?
Adelman: Episodic actually, our first episodic series was on WiiWare; Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People by Telltale. Then we followed it up with the Tales of Monkey Island series, so yeah, episodic is not necessarily new to us. Free-to-play is something that's relatively new to us, and we allow it and we've got some games in the pipeline that are planning on supporting that.
GS: I think it was at GDC you announced a new website. Can you talk about what the response has been to this in the months following?
Adelman: The URL is WiiU-developers.Nintendo.com. It's been overwhelming. We've gotten probably over 1,000, I don't know if we've hit 2,000, developers with really wide-ranging levels of experience. We've got some who have recently left their jobs in mainstream publishers and are starting a new company, or have been indies for a while. All the way to high school students who are thinking of getting into game development and want to know more about it. So one of the challenges is going through and it's ultimately a resource allocation issue at that point. We want to support everybody, so how do we do that in the most effective manner and how do we prioritize in just making sure that--our intent is to support everyone, really. The underlying philosophy is that if you can make a game on our systems, we want to find a way for you to be able to do that.
Full interview here
GS: Going off that, do you fully support free-to-play and episodic and things that people haven't even thought about yet? How flexible are you to going back and looking at your policy?
Adelman: Episodic actually, our first episodic series was on WiiWare; Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People by Telltale. Then we followed it up with the Tales of Monkey Island series, so yeah, episodic is not necessarily new to us. Free-to-play is something that's relatively new to us, and we allow it and we've got some games in the pipeline that are planning on supporting that.
GS: I think it was at GDC you announced a new website. Can you talk about what the response has been to this in the months following?
Adelman: The URL is WiiU-developers.Nintendo.com. It's been overwhelming. We've gotten probably over 1,000, I don't know if we've hit 2,000, developers with really wide-ranging levels of experience. We've got some who have recently left their jobs in mainstream publishers and are starting a new company, or have been indies for a while. All the way to high school students who are thinking of getting into game development and want to know more about it. So one of the challenges is going through and it's ultimately a resource allocation issue at that point. We want to support everybody, so how do we do that in the most effective manner and how do we prioritize in just making sure that--our intent is to support everyone, really. The underlying philosophy is that if you can make a game on our systems, we want to find a way for you to be able to do that.