Now that he’s officially off the leash at Nintendo, Dan Adelman hasn’t been shy about communicating his thoughts on his former boss. Dan worked at Nintendo for nearly nine years and was responsible for a lot of the successes in the indie realm on Nintendo products, including helping launch the WiiWare platform, which eventually evolved into the eShop we’re used to on the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U. In a recent interview with Dromble, Adelman discusses the reason why he believes third party developers decide against supporting Nintendo products, and the answer is Nintendo itself.
Nintendo consumers buy Nintendo systems primarily for the first party content. There’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy in that publishers feel that they can’t compete with Nintendo first party, so they choose not to invest in making high quality products for the platform. There are some notable exceptions to this over the years like Rayman Legends but many times third party publishers set low sales projections for their games, and then decide a development budget based on that. I can’t say outright that they’re wrong either.
Of course, this is something that has long been speculated, given the quality of Nintendo games and the relative loyalty most Nintendo fans feel to their products. Comment sections across the internet are littered with users who disparage third party efforts, while simultaneously admitting that they don’t buy third party products because they feel the quality isn’t worth the asking price. Adelman believes the only way Nintendo can break this vicious cycle is to invest in third parties themselves.
For Nintendo to break this cycle, I think they need to invest and absorb some of the risk for third parties who try to embrace the features of Nintendo platforms and help communicate to consumers which games are on par with Nintendo first party games in terms of quality. Sony and Microsoft spend a lot of money securing exclusives – or at least exclusive features – on the top games and since Nintendo doesn’t really do that, third parties focus on the other systems. I’m not sure about Sony, but I know Microsoft also has a team of technical people that will go work with a studio for a few weeks or even months to help them make their games as good as they can be on those platforms.
Do you agree with Adelman? Should Nintendo begin talking to studios and securing their help with the platform? We’ve seen Nintendo act as publisher for a few titles that would have never seen the light of day, including Bayonetta 2. But while acting as publisher is a start, what Adelman is suggesting is for Nintendo to spend money directly courting third parties and asking them to make their titles Wii U exclusive. Would you support that kind of action from Nintendo?
If you want to read the rest of the review with Adelman, be sure to check it out here.