Indie Sunrise

When former developer Satoru Iwata took over Nintendo from the outspoken and cantankerous Hiroshi Yamauchi, many questioned where he would lead the firm. The company's fortunes were at a low ebb. While it had retained its profitability even through the toughest of times, it had handed away leadership of the console market to Sony, and was soon to face another new competitor in the form of the vastly wealthy Microsoft.

In the face of the relative failure of the GameCube (relative, since the system was profitable and sold similar numbers to the Xbox) and the declining profile of the Game Boy Advance, Iwata took the bold step of announcing a completely new hardware platform for the company.

It was a flip-top handheld with two GBA-sized screens, one of which was touch-sensitive. The consensus of many commentators, both within the industry and in the press, was that Iwata and Nintendo had gone quite, quite mad.

Of course, we all know how that one turned out. The DS went on to become a global phenomenon, single-handedly resurrecting the Japanese games market from sales stagnation, creating a whole new demographic of gamers and whole new genres of games in the process.

When Iwata stood up in front of a packed audience at the Tokyo Games Show two years ago to announce that its diminutive new home console, the Wii, would be only slightly more powerful than the GameCube and would be controlled by a motion-sensitive baton which looked like a simple TV remote control, the criticism was rather more muted.

His detractors had been wrong before. Even if the Wii was flying in the face of every piece of wisdom on the books regarding next-gen systems, those same detractors weren't prepared to be quite so wrong again.

More than anything else we've seen so far - more than the rapturous press reaction, more than the sold-out retail stores - this week's official shipment figures for Nintendo's console prove that Iwata was right. They may even prove him to be the most visionary and inspired executive in the global entertainment industry.

The DS is rapidly hurtling towards a 50-million-unit figure, and may well hit 70 million by next March. The Wii, meanwhile, is rapidly approaching 10 million units - and will almost certainly pass 20 million in the next six months or so. It will quite probably overtake Microsoft's Xbox 360, a console which has enjoyed a full year's head-start, in the process.

Nintendo has torn up the rulebook in the last few years, but, then again, is there a company better placed to do so than the one that wrote the vast bulk of it in the first place?

It was Nintendo, after all, that established the control systems which we presently take for granted on the Xbox and PlayStation. Nintendo itself played a major part in establishing the five-year cycles and technology refreshes which define the games industry. Nobody can argue that Nintendo doesn't know how the game is meant to be played. Faced with larger, wealthier rivals who would bleed the company dry in competition, Nintendo has simply chosen to step sideways - and invent an entirely new game to play.

The industry as a whole now faces a new reality. Nintendo's systems are not a flash in the pan or a gimmick that will go away. There's a strong possibility that the Wii may be the best-selling system for a number of years to come - and the DS certainly looks like holding that crown in the handheld market for a very long time. In other words, if you want to sell to the largest market possible, Nintendo suddenly needs to be your number one priority.

What an about-face! Who would have imagined that Nintendo would suddenly be an essential part of life for third party publishers, after years of producing what were, essentially, niche-interest platforms for first- and second-party development studios? Yet here we are; it's 2007, and if you want (arguably) the best potential sales, you need to be working on a Nintendo game.

For publishers, the path is clear. Platform diversity is a vital component of any successful strategy going forward, and not just for behemoths like EA, which has always released its key titles on every platform going. Every publisher in the market needs to include Wii, and quite possibly DS, in its line-up.

Almost every publisher in the market already does - although some could do with waking up to the potential for titles tailored exclusively to those platforms, rather than hideous, lurching, Frankenstein's monster style ports with badly-tested motion-control systems bolted on to their shambling bodies.

For developers, however, the confirmation of the Wii and the DS as seriously important platforms raises a number of interesting options. For a start, as Iwata planned, the Nintendo platforms put the brakes on the spiralling costs of development. Creating a Wii title requires a lot of good design and creativity, but doesn't actually cost any more - or take any longer - than creating a PS2 game did.

As to the DS, a similar level of creativity needs to oil the wheels of the process, but many developers report that they can get titles up and running on the system at a similar pace to creating PlayStation titles - or even faster. Costs are lower still.

In other words, there's suddenly an escape hatch from the horror stories of the last three years. Team sizes don't have to double, or treble. Budgets don't have to soar. Project lengths don't have to shoot off into the sunset.

Of course, many developers have invested heavily in creating next-gen technology, and that investment may well still pay off for them. For smaller teams, though, or for developers who would only be able to maintain a single next-gen project (but could potentially keep several Wii and DS games on the boil), Nintendo's creation of a mass-market platform with a vast installed base and low costs is a godsend.

Those developers need to be seriously evaluating their options - right now, not tomorrow. Publishers need Wii and DS projects, and many of them have spent so much on upgrading their in-house studios to next-gen development that they're happy to outsource Nintendo platform work.

The reputations of independent developers as Wii or DS dev houses will be made and broken in the coming 12 to 18 months, if not sooner. A name for high quality, efficiently delivered Wii and DS projects would be a feather in the cap of any studio - and could, at last, provide the kind of stability indie developers have craved for years.

It may be extreme, perhaps, to call the climate Nintendo is creating with these platforms a "golden age" for independent developers. However, combined with the escalating success of PC download and casual games and of titles on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Store, it's clear that the market is more open than it has been in decades.

The spread of projects across the range of budgets is wider than ever before, and the routes to consumers more diversified. Perhaps not a golden age yet, but if enough developers grasp the opportunities open to them, there may certainly be a tinge of glitter to the coming years.