Wii U store to beat Xbox and PlayStation on revenue share - report

"The new platform is perfect for indie devs, it's a whole different ball game than WiiWare," the source continued. "They've learned a lot from that mess."

Have Ninty still got their restrictive "You must have a secure office" clause in the contract? Not much use for 'indie devs'.

Edited 2 times. Last edit by Greg Knight on 20th June 2012 9:44am

Posted:11 months ago

I agree Greg.
I don't mind so much the product quality check that Nintendo puts developers through, but the secure office clause (even after the system is released) is ludicrous. If they can become more open like Apple (in terms of its down to dev team how they secure themselves) then i'll be happy with that.

Posted:11 months ago

As a consumer, I wonder what online store restrictions there will be in the next generation. It's ridiculous in this day and age that there are "recognised" countries and territories...

Posted:11 months ago

I had various issues with the rules that Nintendo used to do business with us - but the revenue cut wasn't really one of them.

Agree with the top guys - the "secure office" clause was ultimately responsible for us *stopping* development on Nintendo platforms. The other things Nintendo could seriously improve are:
- LotCheck times, pass rates & resources. Have a more "friendly" LotCheck system, and vastly reduce the paperwork required.

- Cut down on the multilingual requirements for European & US resources (this was huge for us, and a real money cost)

- drop the OFLC/ESRB/USK "required" ratings. This was only ever a requirement because of Nintendo. Apple and all the other online systems get away without this. This adds *months* of development time to any release, and literally thousands of dollars, not to mention massive amounts of paperwork.

- drop (or significantly reduce) the sales threshold requirements.

Nintendo, if you are reading this - and *serious* about getting devs back into your system/WiiU - we would love to do WiiU dev.... you know what to do.

Posted:11 months ago

Micheal, I don't think they'll ever stop required ESRB certification because the ESRB is in place largely because of the actions of Nintendo and Sega back in the 90's. To say nothing of the lawsuits they faced.

While this was largely a brick and mortar retail issue, they've carried the ESRB requirements to their online stores thanks to the lawsuits. To be honest, lawsuits are a large reason why they still continue to do many of the things they do. No 3D for kids under 6, lawsuit. ESRB for eShop, lawsuit. 15 minute break reminders, lawsuit. Seizure warnings, lawsuit.

I do agree that they could be a little more lax on the secure office bit. I think so long as you are a verifiable business (setting up an LLC is incredibly simple) it should qualify.

Posted:11 months ago

Could you chaps elaborate on the "secure office clause"? It's not something that I've heard about being a problem for people before. How did it effect you particularly, if you don't mind me asking?

Posted:11 months ago

Patrick, one of the requirements to be a authroized developer for Nintendo is to have a verifiable place of business. Working on games from just your home isn't valid.

Here is the exact quote from the developer authorization application form:

"In addition, an Authorized Developer will have a stable business organization with secure office facilities separate from a personal residence ( Home offices do not meet this requirement )"


This is likely a hold out from the days prior to the Internet when telecommuting wasn't as prevalent but they do need to relax it considerably.

Posted:11 months ago

For us to become an authorised developer, we not only needed to be a corporation (not just a business) but effectively have a corporate lease and show proof of it. We secured the smallest, cheapest, closest lease we could that was still reasonable... but it still cost us around $400/week in lease costs.

Over our 3 year lease period, the total cost of just the office lease was around $70k AU - which was a huge amount of money for us.

I ended up buying a house (family/mortgage, etc) which included a standalone, separate office space (access separate from the house). This wasn't sufficient for Nintendo, and before we were even told - our developer status was gone. It was particularly annoying, as we were finishing off the demo for our WiiWare Flowerworks game.

Anyway, this is all the past now. I doubt whether we would have continued development anyway, but losing the option was very disappointing.

In the end, we concluded that WiiWare development really wasn't for "indy" (or small) developers at all. I really hope Nintendo learnt from the experience (they weren't happy with the way it turned out either!) and *greatly* improve the system for the WiiU.

I would love to work on/release a WiiU title - but I have no *zero* interest in jumping through the hoops that we did on WiiWare.

Posted:11 months ago

Everything I'm hearing so far suggests they are preparing Wii U to be far more indy developer friendly than WiiWare was.

Keep in mind that when WiiWare was first conceived, the indy scene hadn't evolved into the scene we have today. While that's no excuse for them not changing policy when it did grow, they do seem to acknowledge its existence now and are gearing up to ensure it is a part of the WiiU development family.

Posted:11 months ago

Jim, based on what you've written I think we could get Nintendo to get rid of a lot of their requirements with a lawsuit or two. :)

Posted:11 months ago

Ha. You may be on to something, Craig.

Posted:11 months ago