After Iwata's recent statements abotu wishing to procure more third party support for future nintendo hardware, the head of Japanese studio Alchemist, known for a variety of Dreamcast, PS2, and DS titles, made a rather heated blog post about exactly why numerous developers, particularly small, niche developers, take issue with Nintendo.
Here's the translation, courtesy of Jonnyram over on neogaf:
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After Iwata's big speech at the 3DS announcement, about how third party games are not selling like Nintendo's, Alchemist's boss got a little infuriated, and posted a blog entry to vent his anger: http://www.alchemist-net.co.jp/nikki/?p=2741 Say your game is more popular than you expected (or you were a little too "safe" with first run numbers). If you decide to manufacture more copies, Nintendo says you must start with X thousand (the X is secret because of NDA). Other hardware manufacturers start at 100. There's a massive risk involved for smaller publishers, in particular, here. In the case of DS games, it takes Nintendo 3-4 weeks to manufacture a second run of carts. Other hardware manufacturers have a one week turnaround. When your game is selling like hot cakes, you can understand the need to get extra units out quickly. Nintendo, apparently, doesn't. Other hardware manufacturers are not mentioned here, but the example is given that "let's say it costs 1000 yen per unit to manufacture" (actual cost depends on cart size), and if a game is expected to be a big hit and sell 1 million units, that's 1 billion yen that has to be paid upfront. That's a ridiculous amount and causes a bit of a headache as far as company capital goes. He suggests reducing it to 1/3 upfront payment, to ease the problem. |
He says these three are serious issues, but he also has a fourth point which is more of a request:
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4. Nintendo could try to help with TV advertising Right now, Nintendo is sponsoring a lot of TV shows via advertising. It would be a good opportunity for Nintendo to sub-let advertising to third parties during these programmes. [Note: He's saying it'd be cool if Nintendo would provide opportunities for smaller publishers to pay for TV adverts alongside Nintendo's. Not provide free advertising.] |
The man reveals some interesting information about Nintendo's software distribution policies, and what we see here helps better explain why developers aren't always on friendly terms with the company. There's more to it than the common idea that "developers hate Nintendo".
Having to pay for an entire software run upfront seems like it could be very troublesome issue for smaller developers, particularly companies like NIS that are barely surviving from one game release to the next as it is. Granted, it would normally be expected for a publisher to handle all of their own costs, but the implication is that Sony, Microsoft, and even Sega back in the day handle(d) this situation differently.
