Nintendo’s push to attract indie developers to Wii U is seemingly being met with enormous success.
Having launched their Wii U developer website for aspiring teams to register their interest, the company’s Dan Adelman believes that those that have done so has surpassed well over 1,000.
“It’s been overwhelming. We’ve gotten probably over 1,000, I don’t know if we’ve hit 2,000, developers with really wide-ranging levels of experience,” he explained to GameSpot.
“We’ve got some who have recently left their jobs in mainstream publishers and are starting a new company, or have been indies for a while. All the way to high school students who are thinking of getting into game development and want to know more about it.
“So one of the challenges is going through and it’s ultimately a resource allocation issue at that point. We want to support everybody, so how do we do that in the most effective manner and how do we prioritize in just making sure that–our intent is to support everyone, really. The underlying philosophy is that if you can make a game on our systems, we want to find a way for you to be able to do that.”
Nintendo are actively looking to show their level of commitment to supporting indies, shown through their GDC Europe presentations this year. Though Adelman still believes that there are some developers who haven’t learned of the far less restrictive policies the company has now adopted.
“Developers seem to be overwhelmingly positive. Some of the major changes that we’ve made actually still haven’t been well communicated yet,” he admitted. “We’ve put the message out there and I think we have to keep hammering home the message because we need to make sure that people hear about it. We used to have a lot of barriers on the way to releasing games on our platforms.
“One example would be, we used to require that developers work out of an office that’s separate from their home, and that was a big barrier for a lot of indie developers. And we got rid of that. And still, I talk to developers today who will say, ‘Yeah, I’d love to make a game for a Nintendo platform, but I work at home.’ So I have to say ‘Actually, about six months ago, maybe it was nine months ago, we announced that we changed that policy.'”
[Thanks MCV]
Indie developers flocking to Wii U in their thousands
