Nintendo has been aggressively pursuing indie developers to get them on board the Wii U, and so far it’s paid off. Sort of. The Wii U has a number of high-quality indie titles available for download on the Wii U eShop, and according to Nintendo, there will be many more in the next few months.
In a recent interview with Joystiq, Nintendo’s business development manager, Dan Adelman, said that they expect 20-30 indie games to be released on the Wii U by the Holiday shopping season, around November/December. According to Adelman, the sudden influx of indie titles is due to Nintendo relaxing the strict rules of becoming an authorized Wii U developer.
Nintendo has historically been very “closed” to smaller and indie developers, where game makers had no real way of actually contacting someone at Nintendo in order to get access to the Wii U dev kit and software. All this has changed tremendously over the past year, particularly in the past few months. Back in January, Nintendo removed the policy that required developers to have their own dedicated office.
Previously, developers had to have at least one published game in order for Nintendo to consider them. This left out tons of talented first time developers. Now, according to Adelman, first time game developers are welcome to make Wii U games.
While it’s great to see more indie games on the Wii U, it’s doubtful that this will have any major impact on sales of the console. Nintendo needs third parties to come on board, and they need to speed up their own first party titles as well.