[Wii U] Wii U's eShop features free patches for developers; they can also set prices

[Wii U] Wii U's eShop features free patches for developers; they can also set prices

The Wii's online store was a pretty lacklustre affair, with many developers who worked with it voicing concern. Nintendo has seemingly taken a lot of the criticism and advice on board in order to change how the Wii U's online presence will function as far as digital distribution goes.

We've already seen a positive start with day one digital versions of many key retail games (even if storing them on your Wii U requires an external HDD) but what about those indie developers that are all the rage these days? Will they find a home on the Wii U's eShop?

Nintendo is certainly hoping so.

Frozenbyte games marketing manager, Mikael Haveri, had nothing but praise in an interview with IGN for the Nintendo's approach. He is especially happy that Nintendo lets indie developers set their own prices as well as offering free patching for their games as well.

“That’s what we love about the new eShop,” said Haveri. “We have the power to price our products as we please, with just some basic guidelines from the big guys. The step to this is purely from Nintendos’s side and they clearly see that [their] previous installments have not been up to par. We can set our own pricing and actually continuing on that by setting our own sales whenever we want. It is very close to what Apple and Steam are doing at the moment, and very indie friendly.”

Haveri goes on to say, “They have pushed away all of the old methods that have been established before. Simply put they’ve told us that there are no basic payments for each patch (which were pretty high on most platforms) and that we can update our game almost as much as we want. For indie developers this is huge.”

That's definitely a good start considering that there has been ruckus recently over Microsoft's fee for patching games on Xbox Live (most notably, the Fez mess) so hopefully Nintendo will lead the way to a brighter (and more affordable) future for indie developers.

Written by: Kyran Morrison

(This post was last modified: 11-19-2012 08:24 PM by LemonManX.)

User(s) browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)

View the original article here