Nintendo: We don't want garage developers

#1 Alas not exactly unsuspected news. Having said that I've heard that sales on WiiWare are crap for independants.

Maybe to find out whether your the type of "indie" Nintendo wants he'll personally come to your house and fondle his way through your pants draw ...

Quote:
"The point is, does it maintain its value over time or is it such disposable content that the value quickly goes to zero?

"We want consumers to see value in the software, whatever that appropriate value is. And we want to see that value maintained over time."

The fellow appears quite bonkers on his ideas about software "value" and what does or doesn't have it. Maybe not change the price, how's that? In the end he's used a lot of words and not said anything.


Behold, the first suggestion for his name on google ...

#2 Let me translate from marketeer to something resembling English: "We want high prices so we can continue to take daily baths in delicious, filthy money."

#3 I don't see the problem.

Look back at video game history; the Atari 2600 had little to no restrictions on who could publish a game or what the content of a game was. This resulted in the market being flooded with games of horribly low quality, everyone wanted to make a quick dollar and the games were just rushed out of the door. Also, the sheer number of games, most very similar just made by different people, confused the consumer.

Nintendo came along with the NES, after the video game market had crashed and seemingly burnt out, and placed strict restrictions on who could publish a game and the level of quality required (much like they do today). This resulted in hundreds of high quality games being released and console was a massive success.

Same deal with the original GameBoy Vs the Atari Lynx. The Lynx was miles and miles ahead in terms of hardware, way ahead of its time, but most of the games were poor. The GameBoy was monochrome yet it had a large library of addictive and well written games, and trumped all other hand held consoles.

Nintendo want to protect their products and their reputation, and in turn their customers, can't blame them for that.

#4 Tim,
Your argument suggests that all bad games are developed by Garage game developers. That is not the case. Many large operations produce horrible games. If they wish to judge each game for merit and decide if the quality was good enough to be published then that would suggest that they were concerned with quality.

The Minecraft game was developed by a Garage Game developer. Many cool out of the box thinking small indie developers spur the development of new games. I have a friend who developed a Xbox live game, and that was his resume. Now he has a job at a modest sized firm in San Francisco because of his garage game development.

#5 exceptions to the rule dont break the rule.

Regardless of the ability to pull out a small number of success stories, the facts and figures are fairly simple, a larger percentage of indie developers produce a larger percentage of garbage, than larger more established organisations. Sure we can all list a bunch of indie successes and at the same time list a few bigger organisation failures.

That being said thanks to companies like EA big money companies are fast catching up to indies when it comes to the amount of junk products being released.

The problem is that every day theres more and more indies, and this is increasing the amount of crud available, and making it harder and harder to get a good release noticed.

#6 I don't think it is so much that games are moving to mobile devices as mobile devices bringing in a whole new crowd of casual gamers.

Also I agree with John, many large developers are making crappy games. Suits always want tried and true methods rather than innovative risk, it has always been like that with any business. This leads us to a stagnant market. Indies keep things interesting.

#7 The argument that they don't want "garage developers" is stupid.

How about having a proper QA or a system like greenlight, some indie devs are game design geniuses, the same way some big studios are known to produce crap year after year.

#8 greenlight is a stupid and pointless system, designed by valve so that they can stop wasting valve employee time and 'contracting out' QA to the users.

As for proper QA, you seem to fail to grasp the simple enormity of the logostic task, tale the sheer number of games on iphone and android, and then work out how much time it would take to playtest every single one of them. They have a pretty good QA system, they eliminate 99% of the crap by shortlisting (not including hobby developers) the line has to be drawn somewhere.

As far as big studios that produce crap year after year, i dont know of any of those, sure every so often junk is thrown out, but that definition is generally 100% subjective, eg I personally think that WC3 and WoW are the worst games blizzard ever made (disclaimer: i havent even tried SC2). I'm not a huge fan of FPS games as such, mostly because they have moved the focus from single player to multiplayer and as such eliminated my enjoyment of that game type.

I think there are still plenty of outlets for hobby/indie devs, and if the new kickstarter console ever makes it out into the wild and outside of the USA then we will really see how the opposite of the nintendo view works, i suspect that in reality, finding a good game for an open system will be incredibly rare.

#9 @BloodKnight
I think you might be misunderstanding what Greenlight is. You're right in that it is a tool designed to stop wasting Valve employee time, but for submissions not QA. Greenlight just has users vote on whether they would purchase the game or not if it was available which tells Valve what submissions to actually bother taking a look at.

#10

Quote:
greenlight is a stupid and pointless system, designed by valve so that they can stop wasting valve employee time and 'contracting out' QA to the users.

Thus not stupid or pointless ... does exactly what it's designed to do. ;o)

#11 You know, the last time I thought of any Nintendo product as a platform I wanted to target was...hmmm...I don't know if I ever thought of it as a desired platform target. I guess the wild opinion of any Nintendo exec really is of no consequence.

#12 @scott no misunderstanding, just a very heavy dose of cultured cynicism stacked on top of born cynicism.

While ive seen and even use the term 'the lunatics are running the asylum' i have yet to see a single better use for this particular idiom than greenlight in my personal opinion :)

@frank as a 'western' developer i'd agree with that sentiment mostly, with the exception that i's actually like to dev for a DS like platform. Nintendo is bigger than any of the other console vendors, just not in our neck of the woods.

Sony is just as hard as a platform to get access too, and if the shit on the xbox search is any indication of quality of games the allow into the arcade/indie sections then i'm pretty glad somebody has the balls to step up and say we sont want this crap on our platform, its clear sony and nintendo do not need indie devs.

#13 @bloodknight,
One thing I don't understand is why anyone would start with a console if they are not established yet. Established being cash flow from successful projects. The barrier to entry is higher. Once a developer has a product with some IP that people want that is when one should look at consoles. If the IP is good enough the consoles would solicit the developer.

I searched around and found that the definition of a developer Nintendo intends to work with is a company that does not use their home as a place of business and is established. This is a very narrow view and would have excluded early ID software. It would have excluded a number of current franchises as well.

Now for Nintendo if you go overseas you can buy indie stuff on the street. So that market is being met by black market game distribution. I remember years ago modifying my NES to disable the region chip so I could run black market indie stuff and develop my own carts.

I think if you want to develop for the DS you just need some successful IP and you can probably dictate terms if it is good enough.

On the other note, I think the Greenlight project might tell us a few things: if people like the game, if people hate the game, where it needs work (good for devs), and if people would buy it. The proof in the pudding it to see if any of the Greenlight games get into the store and do well.

#14 From what I seen and understood of the Revolution SDK was that Nintendo wanted secure facility run by solvable studio and used the term "garage developers" with us too, they made it clear that the wanted to secure their SDK and not have them ending up on Ebay like it happened with the Gamecube before it on some occasion. My 2 cents. </necro>

#15 Apple sell far more devices.

#16

Quote:
a larger percentage of indie developers produce a larger percentage of garbage, than larger more established organisations.

True enough. Instead of saying "we don't want garage developers" they should instead focus on the quality - this is what they're aiming for, right? Quality?

According to their statements, not so much. No matter how good your game is, if you work from home then your game isn't good enough.

And that's fine. That means that if I make a wildly popular game I don't have to share my profits with Nintendo. They're happy, I'm happy.

#17 Since this topic has popped back up it should be noted that Nintendo doesn't have the office location rule for becoming a licensed developer any longer. They tossed that out with the WiiU launch. Now you just have to prove that your dev kit will be located in a lockable room. I think there's something about promising reasonable restriction to access of the room as well, haven't read it in a while. There's a gamasutra article several months back interviewing the new guy leading the licensing there and he was going over all the changes.

They do want proven devs only. They have a requirement of two shipped titles, so your first game is not going to be on a Nintendo platform.

#18 That sounds far more reasonable, I'm glad they have come to their senses. Thanks for that update man!

#19 @Scott Good to know.

From Warioworld:

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