In its never-ending push for new games on the Wii U eShop, it looks like Nintendo has accepted another indie into its ranks. The indie developers behind the Ouya title Wrecking Balls Arena DX have officially been accepted as Wii U developers. In a recent post on r/WiiU, the team mentions how easy the process was, in spite of everything they had heard from other developers.
Also, think about it… Nintendo just let an 18-year-old college freshman like me join their Developer Program (plus the other 2 members of Team Kakumei), and all I personally had was a few years of game making experience including some Flash MX, Unity, and Android (OUYA) development as well as being the main developer of the original Wrecking Balls Arena on OUYA. We didn’t have to have an office, any previous experience working at a “real” game company, etc.
Say what you will about Nintendo’s “outdated/ignorant” practices and policies in some areas right now, but if what I just said isn’t an indication of just how open they’re becoming towards indie/garage developers, then I don’t know what is. Currently we haven’t purchased the necessary dev hardware (we can’t say much about all that; NDA), but we’re certainly getting a head-start by beginning work on the “Wii U enhanced” version of WBA: DX in Unity before then.
It’s nice to see the team has such nice words for Nintendo and it’s true, the company seems to have reversed its policies on accepting people to become Wii U developers. Hopefully we’ll see more of this in the future.