On independent game developers

I'm going to start this by saying I'm in no way an expert on this subject matter. My entire programming knowledge is a semester of TrueBASIC in high school with a pretty bad teacher, followed by a semester of Java in college by, again, a pretty bad teacher.

Back at the Game Developer's Conference, Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata went on what I gather was a pretty long discussion of why mobile gaming is bad for the business. The entire business. He didn't mention any specific culprits, but Apple was his pretty clear target due to their increasingly popular iOS (for reference, a quick Google search tells me that as of September of last year, Apple had sold 120 million iOS devices). Google's Android is similarly rising (as of January, they were the top selling mobile platform in the world, more than doubling iPhone sales the previous quarter). His specific point mainly centered around his belief that cheap mobile experiences were devaluing games. That is, that being able to buy a game for $1 (or, very often, free) is bad for everyone. I'm not sure I agree. Ask the developers of hit iOS and Android game, Angry Birds, how bad they're doing. They'll probably be happy to tell you that they're doing quite well.

Nintendo's position largely comes from the from the fact that they want to sell you, first, a rather expensive piece of hardware, followed by a bunch of  cartridge based games for $40-50 depending on platform and so on. Their digital distribution model has, unfortunately, been pretty bad. Go listen to the Giant Bomb podcast, Nintendownload Express, for the one and only person even pretending to be excited to talk about new My Diary software (from his description, I don't think "game" is the right word for this). It's unfortunate, too. Nintendo continues to release new, innovative hardware that often has tons of things for developers to play with, but their near refusal to offer somewhere for a small developer to put games means that . On top of that, we're missing out on what Nintendo's amazing first and second party teams could do when tasked with creating something small and fun. Or we get it, but it comes on a disc, but that's not very common.

More recently, Nintendo of America's president, Reggie Fils-Amie basically mirrored Iwata's statements telling Gamasutra that Nintendo is "not looking to do business today with the garage developer," functionally separating the "real" independent developers from everyone else. And that's fine if that's what they want to do - I just think that Nintendo is missing out on a huge opportunity to bring aboard new developers who might not have the talent or money to make a huge game, but just might be able to make something small centered around a new idea no one else thought of. Portal, one of the highest regarded PC games in recent memory, started out as a school project up at DigiPen. Minecraft was started out as a single guy's project, and he's now hired multiple people after earning (and continuing to earn) oodles of money despite having only recently entered the beta phase of the project. Angry Birds costs all of $1 and has two versions in the Apple App Store's Top 25 listing (presumably by sales but I have no idea).

I don't really know where I'm going with this at this point. I guess I just think Nintendo is being extremely short-sighted and at the same time, I question how much they truly have to fear. I think a well-cultivated ecosystem of downloadable games would offer their platforms games that can't be found elsewhere and generate revenue they probably wouldn't be making otherwise. As it is, I suppose we'll have to be happy with whatever drizzle of games from "real" developers they let through, which if WiiWare and DSiWare are to be the model, won't be a whole lot.