Mikael Haveri, marketing manager at Frozenbyte – the studio behind Trine, has spoken with IGN about the Wii U eShop, revealing a number of interesting facts about it. Interesting for developers, anyways.
It appears that the new eShop is much more friendly to developers and publishers, offering a great deal of flexibility in pricing and distribution, much like the indie-favorite Steam.
“That’s what we love about the new eShop. We have the power to price our products as we please, with just some basic guidelines from the big guys,” said Haveri. “We can set our own pricing and actually continuing on that by setting our own sales whenever we want. It is very close to what Apple and Steam are doing at the moment, and very indie friendly.”
To top it off, Nintendo will not charge extra from developers (indie or otherwise) for future patches and DLC released via its on-line store.
“Simply put they’ve told us that there are no basic payments for each patch (which were pretty high on most platforms) and that we can update our game almost as much as we want, Haveri added. “For indie developers this is huge.”
These news mean that indie developers will have a much easier (and cheaper) time releasing their games digitally on the Wii U, and Haveri hopes this will lead to a better (and cheaper) future for all of us.
“Nintendo’s eShop has the possibility of showing the way for the future of downloadable games on consoles. Not everything is up to par, but so far it looks like a far superior channel to be a part of. We hope that companies like us realize that and more indie games become available on the Wii U eShop.”
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