That doesn't make any sense.

What the hell. Did Cavestory not tip them off some Japanese indie games are really really good? They're lucky they got Cavestory before this policy.

Then again, Cavestory is the only indie game I every tried out >_>

edit: OH it says currently... I hope it changes. Thread title makes it sound like they will never accept submissions from Japanese indies .

I think we need to hear a full explanation first.

Nintendo has different policies to Japanese development. It's part of the hiring culture there I think, they frown upon the idea of someone in Japan making a game in their garage (err, bedroom?).

They prefer the "studio system". My guess is they want to force Japanese development talent to have to apply to one of the "made" Japanese companies and not encourage would be designers/devs in Japan to make games on their own.

Didn't they change that recently where Japanese devs can now make their games from their address?  I'm sure I saw that somewhere.  I think this issue may be different.

That may be NOA and not NOJ.

I think someone needs to find the article.

All I have right now is one big fat "?" Very odd. Id love to hear the reasoning behind it before I say anything else.

So why the hell did they even write the article?   All this does is create confusionn and more negative press for Nintendo when Kotaku doesn't actually know anything.

They probably waited 2 minutes after sending an email to NCL before publishing their article.  

This isn't journalism, it's sensationalism for hits and ad revenue.

The Unity licence fees have nothing to do with Nintendo, Unity have waived the licencing fees for Unity (probably after receiving a sizable lump sum from Nintendo). What Nintendo have done is waived the licencing fee for patches, but as far as I know developers still have to pay a Submission fee for them for Standards and Functional testing.

Developers also get a free licence for Greenhill's MULTI IDE, Havok middleware and Autodesk middleware.