Nintendo has developed a set of nominally indie-friendly or at least non-interfering policies.
Nintendo Minecraft Xbox 360
Most of these policies don’t benefit Mojang, they benefit garage-type developers.
This is a good thing, and it’s a real problem with XBLA.
But it’s not really a part of the Minecraft calculus.
There’s another dimension about being “pro-indie”, and that’s accessibility, reaching out to indie developers pro-actively, courting them, and giving them development support.
We haven’t seen that with Nintendo.
Now, Valve is mostly a hands off platform manager, but they still interact proactively with some independent developers–including stuff like the potato sack, indie bundles before indie bundles existed, sale and daily sale events that Valve manages along with developers, etc.
But yes, Valve is mostly hands-off.
By contrast, Sony and Microsoft actively seek stuff to publish. They secure games. They fund games. They market games.
In Minecraft Xbox 360′s case, Microsoft approaches Mojang.
Microsoft dedicates the development resources so Mojang takes on no risk whatsoever. Microsoft pays Mojang.
Microsoft markets the game. Microsoft features the game prominently. You see what I mean?
This doesn’t mean Microsoft doesn’t have annoying policies on patch certification, publishing requirements, pricing, etc… it just means that the platform holder factors that apply to Minecraft are better suited to Microsoft’s style than Nintendo’s right now.
The new eShop games being announced are a good thing, but by and large they’re “my first title” games being announced by individual people who have no track record in development. They are not a guarantee for success.
Many of those level titles never make it out, or end up being a disaster.
You’ll remember “Eternity’s Child”, the AAA smash hit by Luc Bernard for WiiWare, which released on PC to 1/10 reviews, never got a WiiWare release.
Meanwhile Mr. Bernard announced several other titles, none of which ever got released.
I can do the same kind of rundown for XBLA, so I’m not saying this is unique to the eShop, I’m saying that if you think the last few weeks have constituted an indication of strength for the eShop, that’s a bad read.
It would be better to emphasize the success of titles that have been released, but even then we’re not talking about the kind of base to launch Minecraft on.
Minecraft Xbox 360 was big, even for XBLA, but there were a number of really big titles already there that served as proofs of concept that big titles could work.
“It will be better in the future” is almost certainly true, and I think Baconsammy is wrong to say that Wii U is dead and buried today, or that Nintendo is “abandoning it”.
Nintendo’s errors occurred in the pre-launch phase, when they didn’t allocate resources properly then.
Their reactions so far seem good to me, and I can’t think of anything they could do to solve the problems faster.
Again, not that they didn’t make mistakes, they made huge ones (going back to the Wii, really, because their design decisions for the Wii left them profoundly unprepared for many of the responsibilities they need to take on today), but basically I think their post-launch behaviour has been fine.
But Mojang is very conservative with their product releases, and when they say Wii U is very unlikely, what they mean is that they haven’t seen anything to convince them they need to get in on it — so maybe Nintendo hasn’t been aggressively enough courting them, maybe Nintendo doesn’t have reliable projections for how the install base will grow, etc.
No one is defending the Vita’s overall performance. It’s abysmal.
However, the silver lining appears to be that the limited install base that is there is engaged in buying independent titles.
Again, this doesn’t apply to Mojang — this is a series of developers who sell 50k or 100k happy to get another 50k revenue stream.
And that’s great for them! I wish them tons of success! But it’s not likely that you’ll see major, multi-million selling titles get a Vita SKU even noting its apparent independent praise.
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