Topic: Unite 2014 - Unity and the Nintendo Wii U eShop

Pretty interesting 25 minute keynote about Unity on the Wii U and the eshop as a whole.

The sucesss of Shovel Knight is staggering. Selling 75K copies in the first week, with the 3DS being the bigger of the two consoles.

Great news indeed

It was a simultaneously really cool and really boring video.

It's cool that it's a thing at all, both in terms of the Nintendo, Unity, developer relationship, but also that it was posted online. But it isn't exactly something I could see nearly anyone wanting to watch ever, and people who would be interested like myself, kinda know a good chunk of this.

Sweeet. I've really been enjoying the indies titles on both 3DS and Wii U. It looks like the steady flow of indie titles isn't stopping soon.

I've been telling people for months now that Wii U eShop NWF/Unity program is a great experience/opportunity for indies. And I'm speaking from experience (I created ZaciSa's Last Stand), went from never creating a game to now having a released game on the eShop. Nintendo is really easy to work with and super helpful.

I just wish Nintendo would be more open about their indie program. They have bad habbit of being kinda quiet/shy about it, so a lot of people don't know too much of how open Nintendo is if they don't follow Nintendo closely.

Yeah, I wish they would do a Nintendo Direct focused on just indie games. With some announcements and at the end they can tell devs who are watching to go to their website and sign up for the dev program. I asked a dev on twitter yesterday if a Wii U version of his game would be possible and he said that Unity licenses can cost upwards of 20k per platform and I was baffled (If anyone doesn't know: Unity is free for Wii U devs). I told him that it's free and now he signed up for the program. They also really need to get more agressive. I feel like I'm doing a bit of their work on twitter by constantly asking devs about Wii U versions of their games and then directing them to Damon. They need to get a bit more agressive. I can only do that for smaller devs, but big ones like the guys behind Hotline Miami, Fez etc. are practically unreachable for me.

Yeah, I have noticed how different Nintendo advertises/let's the world know of indies compared to Sony. Sony goes all out usually, esp with their blog updates, esp the dev update blog entries. Sony tries their best to let everyone know about the indies on their platform and how open it is. And thus, now everyone knows PS4/Vita is a great indie platform, look at all this press they do. And with PS+ indie giveaways and reduced pricing, it gets even better for getting word out there.

Now look at Nintendo, the best they do is just slightly show off the more hype indie games every few months in a Nintendo Direct. They are obviously not trying to hide their indies, they just are too damn quiet. So I'm not surprised that some indies that don't follow Nintendo don't really know how open their program is and how well the indies on their platform perform. Nintendo basically left the door open for everyone and forgot to turn on the lights to indicate they are open is the best way to describe it.

Don't get me wrong, I am happy with how they treat me, they have been super helpful with helping me get a game out and constantly updating the dev tools. They just need to start shouting from the roof tops to help let people know about their program instead of being mute.

In my opinion the difference between the way Sony and Nintendo approaches Indie games is that Sony wants the indie games to help push their system. Sony dumps a lot of money into serveral indies to get timed-exclusive deals and to advertise Indies. Nintendo leaves Indies alone to let them do as they please. Indies are pretty much allowed to release how they want and under the conditions they want with Nintendo. Once a company starts paying for things they start to expect certain things. The way Sony does it drags indies into the spotlight more but the way Nintendo does it allows Indies the freedom to do what they want. I am not saying one way is better than another but I personally like how Nintendo does it more, also Nintendo gets more true Indie games while Sony seems to publish (or co-publish) a lot of indies which means they aren't actual indies any more, they just carry that name because the development team was small.

I think I like the way Sony does it as it actually gives a spotlight to indies. My own game is barely noticeable and has no exposure. I would have loved to get some kind of spotlight for my game and others. haha. I do agree that Sony kinda goes after the big guys, and are sometimes just ports of big indie games.

From a sales perspective and with what I've talked to others, Nintendo has bad habit of only showing off your game on the eShop home page if it has hype behind it to begin with. So if are a brand new indie, good luck at getting features or even getting any kind of small banner.

So you can see why I like the Sony method of showing off indies, even though I prefer to work with Nintendo with how simple they are (Free unity/NWF/etc) haha

Yea, there are defiantly pluses and minuses to how each company approaches Indie Games.