Topic: eShop bundling?

There's a thread about Nintendo doing more to promote Wii U as a party system with more bundles along those lines and it occurred to me that Nintendo could include eShop games.

Not that I think the eShop is struggling, but it would be pretty good for indies and Nintendo if they bundled indie titles they thought would have broad appeal with machines. It wouldn't cost a lot and help raise the profile of Nintendo further with indie devs. I'm thinking a Wii Party U or Mario Party 10 bundle that also has Spin the Bottle or maybe Trine pre-installed. You could have Affordable Space Adventures pre-installed alongside a Nintendo adventure title like Zelda or Xenoblade. I guess you could achieve a similar goal with an eShop card, but this is as much about promoting indies as the eShop.

TBH games like Trine and Affordable Space Adventures don't have mass appeal or scream buy this console for this game. Spin the Bottle add to the Wii U's party console vibe but Ninty have their own games that can do that and probably better too.

I think perhaps you could do an indy bundle with perhaps 20 or so games and promote it on the number of games bundled rather than them individually. But this probably wouldn't be cost effective/easy to agree with developers a reasonable cost so I think it's a pipe dream.

I wasn't thinking the bundled title(s) would be standalone and used to sell the machines on their own, more that they'd be an extra for the consumer. The main people this is trying to excite would be the devs themselves. In a break with the past Nintendo bundling third-party titles from indies to demonstrate their commitment towards having a vibrant indie developer scene on the Wii U. Obviously system exclusives would get priority.

Actually I think bundling the games that have less appeal and are exclusive would be smarter. Affordable Space Adventures and Pushmo World would look really good in a Bundle, where Trine and Spin the Bottle probably wouldn't look as good. But that is just my opinion.

No you may be right and Nintendo may well want to choose exclusives too.

There are a few bundles on the Vita. One you can buy with a memory card and then one you can download digitally (there might be more, that's all I've seen). I think they do OK. Dunno if I'd care for them personally though. There are already enough games out there, I don't need to be buying 4 games I'll probably never play just because they come with the 1 I want.

Anything to give quality indies more exposure is usually a good thing. But this would never happen, and arguably this is a sort of ridiculous way to do it. What I would suggest is for Nintendo to publish a retail collection of some of the best indies.

I would see that as a better option too. Guess it'd either come down to Nintendo or other publishers to organize though.

I can't see anything more ridiculous about this idea than getting your iPhone, iPad or indeed your 3DS or Wii U pre-loaded with apps. It's just the source of the applications (games) in question that differs. Putting a copy of Affordable Space Adventures on every new Wii U sold isn't much different to me than pre-loading the Facebook app on my iPhone - other than most people knowing what the latter is and that's kind of the point.

I can see that. I was at a Best Buy a while back checking some PS4 games, and they had a retail copy of Stick it To the Man.