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Why is Nintendo hiding their head of indie relations? (Gamasutra)

jay

Member
What most people replying to the article read: "Nintendo sucks at indies" *goes to post how wrong the shitty article is Nintendo rules indies love Nintendo check out how many copies Gunman Clive sold.*

What the article actually says: "Nintendo's primary person responsible for outreach to Indies is limited by the company in the methods he's allowed to use for outreach because the company's culture is hostile to public communication. Although Nintendo still has other ways to reach out to indies, because they have a lack of public presence, some developers are no doubt slipping through the cracks."

Yeah, but you're forgetting how wrong the shitty article is, that Nintendo rules, indies love Nintendo, and how many copies Gunman Clive sold.
 
Except the reality is that games are coming to the eShop.

Kind of the point of this exercise is that "technically more than zero games are being released" is a pretty low standard to hold in comparison to, for example, what Sony's indie program has been producing recently, and that communication problems like the one described in this article get in the way of bringing the eShop's indie presence up to that level.
 

Tookay

Member
What most people replying to the article read: "Nintendo sucks at indies" *goes to post how wrong the shitty article is Nintendo rules indies love Nintendo check out how many copies Gunman Clive sold.*

What the article actually says: "Nintendo's primary person responsible for outreach to Indies is limited by the company in the methods he's allowed to use for outreach because the company's culture is hostile to public communication. Although Nintendo still has other ways to reach out to indies, because they have a lack of public presence, some developers are no doubt slipping through the cracks."

This.

Scrolling down the first page, I felt like I had read a different piece than the rest of the thread did.
 

OmegaFax

Member
Miiverse has "Verified User" posts and communities set up for announcements, like Sakurai's weekday Smash Bros. updates.

They're not community managers in any sense of the word and don't really engage the users (as far as I've seen). Very sterile.

I can't help but imagine they have a single internet connected 3DS inside a room like where they kept the NOC list from the first Mission Impossible (that room Tom Cruise had to rapel inside of with all the lasers and whatnot) where they have employees access it to post Miiverse messages one at a time.

Nintento has personality, it's just guarded and not reliant on it. Maybe that's a point Shuhei Yoshida of Sony Worldwide Studios (aka yosp) was trying to make when he was trollin' a few Miiverse comments a while ago.
 

Shard

XBLAnnoyance
I think something that is really being missed here is the real reason Dan has been muzzled, he did something that would have gotten him muzzled in a lot of places. He broke the code of corporate messaging and doctrine. According to the article he got frozen because he agreed that 3DS Region Locking may have been a bad idea since international travel is a thing. Let us not forget that Nintendo policy is HURR HURR REGION LOCKING AM GOOD and to break ranks in a public setting, he is actually lucky he wasn't fired over such remarks.
 
Kind of the point of this exercise is that "technically more than zero games are being released" is a pretty low standard to hold in comparison to, for example, what Sony's indie program has been producing recently, and that communication problems like the one described in this article get in the way of bringing the eShop's indie presence up to that level.

The Wii U's eShop (not counting full retail games or VC games) only has 51 entries. 51! That's absurd to me that the selection of DD games can be so low
 
Anyone even thinking of defending Nintendo in this situation should read the article.

If Nintendo wants to be seen as more of a faceless corporation than Microsoft, that's their prerogative, but it's terrible business in the age of social media, podcasts, and customer experience.
 
Yet I feel like Sony does an absolutely fantastic job at it. The fact that @yosp is such a big figure on twitter for the Playstation community speaks volumes. Hell at least they respond to things like #ps4nodrm. Closest thing Nintendo has is some NoA Treehouse people on twitter. Nintendo should really try and listen to there fans complaints in order to gain some respect back.

While Sony is a Japanese company, its management has been Western since Stringer took over in 2005. And Kaz may be Japanese born and bred, but he operates like many Western execs, probably because he rose through the ranks at Sony Computer Entertainment America.
 

gogogow

Member
Wait.

This:

This was viewed as unacceptable in Nintendo's eyes, so there you go.

There you go what?! How does Gamasutra/the writer know? He's just guessing? Iwata told him it was unacceptable?
 

Instro

Member
Its sad, Adelman was one of the few bright spots in this company. Guys like him should be the face of Nintendo and have way more clout than they do.
 
sörine;109520935 said:
So how many DD only games do PS4 and X1 boast in comparison? How many did each launch with?

PS4 currently has 36 released and available to buy on the store, with another 9 coming soon (as in, their store pages are already up). I'm sure there's more in the immediate future not listed on their store yet.

Don't know about Xbox, but I'm sure there's a way to check.

The Wii U has been out for 17 months and has 51 games, the PS4 has been out for 5 and has 36
 

phanphare

Banned
Wait.

This:



There you go what?! How does Gamasutra/the writer know? He's just guessing? Iwata told him it was unacceptable?

yeah the writer doesn't really seem all that credible to me. comes off a bit butthurt, for lack of a better term, about not being granted an interview.
 
*as part of a $50 a year subscription...which you lose if you stop paying that subscription.

Agreed. I'm no fan of the PS+ model either, which is why is so frustrating that Nintendo could be doing better with its free online. But instead, they do dumb stuff like hide Dan Adelman lest he go off message that Nintendo has the best third-party support, the Wii U is selling gangbusters, and there are no US troops at the Baghdad airport.
 
Clearly not..otherwise it wouldn't have been called "free".
Jesus, are we really going to delve into this level of semantics? GAF will need a fucking Wikipedia citation system for the end of posts if we have to cite and explain every word in commonly used context.

Stick it to the Man will be free
(to access in select regions for the duration of subscription barring acts of God and the heat death of the Universe)
on PS Plus.

It's the same nonsense that comes up when people say the WiiU doesn't have an account system. Because the commonly held definition of what an account is and what that means in the context of modern, connected electronics is not the textbook definition, it becomes a semantic argument of "but it does, just locked to the device, and without any of the features all other account systems have!"
 

gogogow

Member
yeah the writer doesn't really seem all that credible to me. comes off a bit butthurt, for lack of a better term, about not being granted an interview.

Yeah, he does sound a bit butthurt at times in the article. Dan Adelman not using his twitter account is unfortunate, but surely you can still contact him by his Nintendo email address?

Also he's putting incorrect, plain false information in his article, like Popstar mentioned above. Unity being free is also on the official Wii U Developer website, which each indie dveloper needs to access first in order to get a license.

He also mentions how Sony gave him some free space on Playstation.com for his game, but fails to mention how Nintendo reserves a lot of space for indie games too in the eShop's front page. The article is extremely one sided.
 

botty

Banned
Considering how long you have the potential to own the PS+ games, I'd say it's a bit ridiculous to complain about it getting locked when the PS+ runs out. And if you like the game so much, I am sure you'll have no problem going out and buying it for 19.99 or whatever reduced priced the game will inevitably be by that time. PS+ is great for a lot of gamers who just beat games and never go back to them, and it also exposes people to things that might have skipped or never even heard of.
 
sörine;109520935 said:
So how many DD only games do PS4 and X1 boast in comparison? How many did each launch with?

On US PSN, PS4 has (by my count) 48 listed after five months. The Vita list is around 250. I'll have to see if there's some convenient way to pull a number out for X1.

I'd personally rather have vastly more VC titles on my Nintendo platforms rather than indies.

PSN is ahead of Nintendo in terms of both indie and classic game releases quantity-wise, so I'm not sure this really has to be an either/or choice.
 

gogogow

Member
Considering how long you have the potential to own the PS+ games, I'd say it's a bit ridiculous to complain about it getting locked when the PS+ runs out. And if you like the game so much, I am sure you'll have no problem going out and buying it for 19.99 or whatever reduced priced the game will inevitably be by that time. PS+ is great for a lot of gamers who just beat games and never go back to them, and it also exposes people to things that might have skipped or never even heard of.

You have to resubscribe, because Sony won't allow you to buy it in the store. So either you resubscribe or unless Sony has fixed this recently, you have to buy a physical copy.
 

nampad

Member
The advantage of Twitter isn't in using it as a substitute for email, it's in its ability to kickstart unexpected conversations and get people talking with a very low barrier to entry. When you have an indie outreach guy on twitter, you have someone who can hear about cool new games from reading their twitter stream, or who can pop into ongoing conversations with indie studios, or who can ask for feedback and start a big public discussion about the strengths of their platform.

In this case, Twitter's standing in as a proxy for public communication in general in part because Nintendo has so few routes for such communication that dropping this one route is a pretty significant loss.



It's working much better than it did last generation, certainly. It's not working anywhere near as well as Sony's comparable push is, though, which indicates that there's still room for improvement.

It is good to see individual developers seeing some success on Nintendo's platforms this time around (again, very much unlike most people's experience on Wii and DSi) but it's still limited primarily to devs who target eShop for timed exclusives. Getting to the next step in terms of building up indie support is going to have to involve bringing in more of the PC indies, and that's very difficult to do without real, ongoing public communication.



This is like the generic head-in-the-sand position. "All those people complaining must be part of an insidious conspiracy!" No, it's just people complaining about stuff that comes up while they're doing their jobs. If you look at the things Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have broadly been taken to task for over the last ten years (by press, developers, or consumers) very few of the most major complaints are unsupported and almost all of them are things that the platform-holders went out of their way to remedy later on down the line.

Very well said. I am surprised so many people still don't see te advantage of Twitter. Yes of course you can email them or use the official route but those informal tweets do so much more than just that.

Except the reality is that games are coming to the eShop. Just one look at the eShop shows that new games from independent developers are coming regularly.

I mean, yes, Dan Adelman not being active on twitter should be concerning, but saying that the indie initiative is "dead" is a bit much when they're actually showing up on the marketplace.

Its akin to saying that the White House isn't working just because they don't respond to every petition at whitehouse.gov

Edit: http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/04/25/stick-it-to-the-man-gets-wii-u-release-date Stick it to the Man is coming to the Wii U eShop on May 1st. This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about, do people even check out the eShop before calling something dead?

And people point fingers and laugh at other platforms for getting old ports. Maybe you also should have picked a better than at best mediocre game.

I am with Dave, there are games coming but compared to the competition the eShop still needs a lot of work. Of course, this won't happen from on day to another but shutting down the indie guy from Twitter doesn't really help with the progress.
 
Considering how long you have the potential to own the PS+ games, I'd say it's a bit ridiculous to complain about it getting locked when the PS+ runs out. And if you like the game so much, I am sure you'll have no problem going out and buying it for 19.99 or whatever reduced priced the game will inevitably be by that time. PS+ is great for a lot of gamers who just beat games and never go back to them, and it also exposes people to things that might have skipped or never even heard of.

Still it's not free as some claim
 

nampad

Member
You have to resubscribe, because Sony won't allow you to buy it in the store. So either you resubscribe or unless Sony has fixed this recently, you have to buy a physical copy.

Never heard of that. You can't buy the games you got from the subscription while you are subscribed. Should work when the subscription ends though.
 

sörine

Banned
PS4 currently has 36 released and available to buy on the store, with another 9 coming soon (as in, their store pages are already up). I'm sure there's more in the immediate future not listed on their store yet.

Don't know about Xbox, but I'm sure there's a way to check.

The Wii U has been out for 17 months and has 51 games, the PS4 has been out for 5 and has 36
I did look it up, Xbox One has 12 DD only games currently going by their website. Nintendo also has videos or pages up for 17 (presumably soon) coming Wii U DD games on the eShop.

I'm also unsure where that 51 games number originates? Searching on the eShop brings up 64 released DD only titles although that includes non gaming apps like Hulu or Wii Street U. Are there really 13 apps on Wii U?

I also looked up launch dates for DD only games. PS4 launched with 9 (3 being "free" downloads, 4 being from Sony), Wii U with 5 (all 3rd party) and One with 4 (1 being "free", all from Microsoft).
 
Guys this isn't a PS+ thread. Talk about the subject, please?

Also he's putting incorrect, plain false information in his article, like Popstar mentioned above.

This is a pretty uncharitable claim. With the Unity license you're looking at a development perk -- i.e. something Nintendo theoretically offers in order to bring developers onto their platform -- which they never announced formally. In order to find out about it you'd have to either read one random interview, or else already have signed up as a developer (in which case, it failed entirely in serving as an incentive to bring you on board.) The fact that the author missed that one interview kind of speaks to the point that this information was not promoted effectively.

In general these kinds of discussions tend to bring out a lot of people who claim that all negative commentary is driven by some kind of secret animus, which to me is a claim far less supported by reality than anything in the original article under discussion.
 
Guys this isn't a PS+ thread. Talk about the subject, please?



This is a pretty uncharitable claim. With the Unity license you're looking at a development perk -- i.e. something Nintendo theoretically offers in order to bring developers onto their platform -- which they never announced formally. In order to find out about it you'd have to either read one random interview, or else already have signed up as a developer (in which case, it failed entirely in serving as an incentive to bring you on board.) The fact that the author missed that one interview kind of speaks to the point that this information was not promoted effectively.

In general these kinds of discussions tend to bring out a lot of people who claim that all negative commentary is driven by some kind of secret animus, which to me is a claim far less supported by reality than anything in the original article under discussion.

It was announced, just lots of journalists chose to ignore the announcement
 
After a second attempt at reading the article, I can firmly say that it's no more credible than an angry forum rant. I'm not familiar with Gamasutra's policies, but still flabbergasted that a respected website would allow the publication of an article with so many inaccuracies. The comments section does a good job of clarifying to some of the articles inaccuracies and I think people should read it before citing the article to make their usual arguments on gaf.
 
The comments section does a good job of clarifying to some of the articles inaccuracies and I think people should read it before citing the article to make their usual arguments on gaf.

The comments are actually pretty good on this article, with some interesting discussion from industry and press types, but outside of "but Gunman Clive!" and (largely misleading) claims about 3DS sales performance I don't actually see much that disagrees with the article on a factual basis.
 
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