Nintendo Looking to the US for Indie WiiWare Talent
By Chris on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 1:33 PM PST In Game Companies, Game Consoles, Game Platforms, Gamer Life, Games, Nintendo, Nintendo
Shigeru Miyamoto thinks the most unique products have always come out of America. That’s surprising, coming from the man behind a game like Pikmin. But he was adamant in saying it, when speaking about the launch of WiiWare and the future of indie developers.
“I think America has always been better at creating unique products,” he said. Nintendo is looking to have a platform where indie games can succeed by opening itself to even the smallest of developers.
“Here in the United States, you have these independent developers who have managed to get the skills and the training and the development, and also have managed to get access to the technology and the hardware needed to develop it,” he said. “They’re able to let their own personality and their own kind of unique interests really flourish in the games that they’re creating.”
Reggie Fils-Aime explained that there’s no oversight by Nintendo, and all they do is insure the game isn’t buggy and has an ESRB rating. It’s an interesting approach, but not all that different from the “Nintendo Seal,” which is devoid of any sort of quality assurance.
via Game|Life
“the “Nintendo Seal,” which is devoid of any sort of quality assurance.”
Actually, making sure a game isn’t buggy IS quality assurance.
There also used to be a thing where they made sure the games released on their system weren’t complete garbage, which is what I’m talking about.
You still have to be pretty damn high up on the Indie food chain to stand any chance of developing for Wiiware.
“There also used to be a thing where they made sure the games released on their system weren’t complete garbage, which is what I’m talking about”.
Haha, somebody didn’t play many nes/snes games. Both those consoles were littered with cashin garbage, just like the playstation and the playstation 2 and the Wii. The seal has never meant anything other than that the game is officially licensed, won’t crash the system, and (in the early days) isn’t overly graphic. It was initiated in response to all the problems people had with Atari cartridges. You may not remember, but you didn’t have to license your games for play on early Atari machines. Everyone was making games for that system with no testing or oversight. Hell, I think even quaker oats made a game. Needless to say, this situation led to horrible games that didn’t even boot up properly. They ditched the word “quality” because years after the Atari meltdown, people forgot about how bad that was and then they thought it was some sort of judgement about how “good” the game is. This was a good idea to ditch the word quality based on that, because so many people misunderstood what it meant.
I don’t think you remember the early Nintendo days where they would only allow third parties to release a certain number of games every year, and there a number of other stringent requirements. It’s quite a lot different these days.
@chris,
Ok, I see what you’re saying. Yes, they had a 5 game maximum, but that was really to minimize the footprint of third parties. They didn’t want anyone to get too powerful on their system. Although they sold it as a move to increase quality, I don’t think they had any true measure of what a “quality” title was. Games like Deadly Towers and Shaq Fu are proof of that. If you want a good time learning about all the dreck on the NES, check out the Angry Nintendo Nerd. Man, some of those games were absolutely horrible. If the seal of quality actually meant only good games got on the early systems, then the seal was a massive failure.