Vena said:
AAA is in the minority and a dying breed, their big-hit-titles are all sliding down the slopes after so much milking. They make financially ruinous games, sink millions of dollars into projects from which they expect unrealistic returns, kill off any IPs with only marginal success, and breed a culture of hype and pre-order bullshit. AA and Indie is the majority of developers and, if anyone bothered to ever look, are usually on good terms with Nintendo and Nintendo does plenty to support their developments and games. The N3DS is in part built to support one of the major platforms for indie game development and mobile development: Unity. The OG3DS cannot support it and, as such, the cost of indie games on the 3DS is considerably higher and harder to achieve. The stink here isn't about "the majority" its about shiny AAA. |
Bolded: Except that that isn't even remotely true, Nintendo were the very last to reach out to Indies and have been worse at giving out development tools and eased distribution models for smaller titles to reach the customer. They have also openly and vocally opposed user generated content since it started becoming a thing in the late 90's and early 2000's. Nintendo are swimming upstream on purpose and their fans are blaming the currents for the lack of progress; it is such an extremely backwards way of thinking and needs to end. I think you will find, if you ever bother to look, that Sony are by far the ones with the best relations with Indie developers, they have even paid for independent developers' exhibitions at TGS, provide free developer kits (Nintendo charges for theirs) and developer tools, as well as promotion and distribtuion, in a massively superior form at that (the distribution part).
PS: I never said that the majority of developers are all about AAA development; I simply stated that "you cannot expect the majority of developers to customize their efforts around a minority that refuses to adapt to market movements", implying that Nintendo are the ones who have done the least to compromise and meet 3rd parties midway and they have insisted on foregoing traditional and widespread solutions (such as formats and online, distribution models etc) and tried to push their own, and often half-baked, solutions instead. Where in that sentence did I state that this is about AAA titles? Nintendo have by far the worst developer relations out of the big three, and that goes for every segment of the industry.
