That's one person that was trying to bring some sanity to Nintendo. And, wow, some people really like to bash Nintendo, just for the sake of it.

Big loss for Nintendo. The interview revealed some very strange practices going on at the company. NoA needs to escape from NoJ's shadow.

Best of luck to Dan.

The eShop is still young, but it's clearly on it's way towards being just as vibrant as, if not more so than, any indie scene as on any other console.

And there is a vision to it: between the adoption of Unity for Wii U (which WiiU developers get free full access to with a dev kit, courtesy Nintendo) and the Nintendo Web Framework (using HTML, CSS and Javascript for games and apps), Nintendo has basically lowered the barrier of entry to their ecosystem more than any other gaming platform holder.

The eShop isn't young.. it's from 2011.. its been 3 years already.. and they had the Wiishop channel and Dsi ware before.. when was it that they finally had a unfied account system? begin of this year/late last year? They wasted too much time on it.. everyone else had unified accounts why didn't Nintendo?

Unity for Wii U  is great, but better would have been Unity for 3DS.. its an ARM11 and ARM 9 cpu in the 3DS.. they ported Unity 3D to run on ARM in 2011.. Unity 3D for 3DS should have been available a long time ago.. and with that you would have seen more Cross-buy games with the WiiU from the start.. Nintendo Web Framework is nice but not many games are running in that enviroment..

To me Nintendo missed their chance and are trying to catch up, like in the Article itself, they have been wrong, ancient, and stupid with their policies. But still,
Ouya paid 1 million dollar have timed exclusives, Lots of crossbuy games which runs on iPad and iPhone.. (used to be seperate games).. Look at the indie exclusives the Xone and PS4 has gotten through deals.. I think they could have done much, much more..

Sure Nintendo is trying to catch up but they are behind. I can close my eyes for it and hope for the best, but I can also applaud Nintendo for making a trying to make change. A hard fast one.. if Dan Adelman was working 9 years on the indie side of Nintendo he might not have been the right man for the job. Was it Nintendo's internal policies or Dan Adelman that made them lag behind.. We only hear Dan's story but he may just not have been good enough to pull it off..

-edit-
ow I got a warning for my last post.. can one really say Nintendo's indie policy is good? Has it improved? Surely.. can it be much much better like the article in the OP points to the problems? absolutely..

To an extent, I agree with Nikkom. That said, I doubt the issues he raises can be laid at Adelman's feet. I have yet to hear a single source say anything bad about him - especially from indies themselves - and I'm pretty confident in saying that he did more on this front than anyone else at Nintendo. I expect his successor will be less proactive and/or powerful, so things are likely to take a step back.

Well that's to been seen but Adelman, while he did his stuff, should have been more pro-active.. like the switch from Epic to have the Unreal Engine really cheap on a monthly subscription.. it's pretty clear a lot of indies will switch to it.. UE4  runs on mobile phones but not WiiU and 3DS.. Maybe he did said to nintendo we need to send 4 programmers to them to have it run on the WiiU and 3DS and nintendo did nothing.. but then he should have been the one to push it through. Heck he should have been fishing for Minecraft even when the succes was already there.. How great of a succes would that have been if it was on the 3DS.

look at this article from April 25 2014:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/207218/The_brick_wall_No_close_encounters_with_Nintendos_indie_exec.php

It talks about the pr support they get from sony and ms compared to Nintendo.. how that has created goodwill with other indie devs.. that's what Adelman should have done. I'm hoping for a successor with a bit of marketing insight..

-edit- if Viper1 still thinks I'm starting a flamewar he may say so and i'll leave this thread

Why does Nintendo even bother having NOA? They don't let them do anything, even Iwata, lol, who "took over" as president of NOA has done basically nothing.

They're just a joke of a subsidary these days with the authority to do nothing. 

It wasn't much of a scene, afaik, yeah good games come and go, but the indie scene is happening now, and not so much on wii u.

o yeah I talked about kemco games in another thread but there is a great example.. There are some kemco jrps on the Eshop: Grinsia and alphedia genesis..
Kemco basicly is a budget/almost indie developer now..

they also released some visual stories like http://www.kemco.jp/applipage/wiigame/wiiu/dmlc/index.html on the eshop

all in all 7 games
http://www.kemco-games.com/kemcojp_data/3ds/3dsindex.html
http://www.kemco.jp/applipage/wiigame/wiiu/top.html

They ain't the best games (i have like 12 of them on iOS) but people don't realise how many games Kemco have put out in the last years:
http://www.kemco.jp/applipage/iphone/top.html and thats just the iOS list.. the android page is a mini-site on itself:
http://www.kemco.jp/index_android.html
A lot of them have been translated to the west: http://www.kemco-games.com/global/games.html

Is there a reason why they don't release them all on 3DS/WiiU but just a few? Is it Kemco or is it Nintendo that's doing something wrong? I think Nintendo should actively go after these titles.. strenghtend the eShop, making it more attractive for more developers..

Having actually read the Kotaku interview and Dan's recent tweets, it doesn't sound all bad (though the press is certainly going to spin it as being all bad). Sounds like Adelman wanted to do his own thing for a few years now, but never really had the courage to speak up. Hope it goes well for him!

Also, he said this little tidbit towards the end of the interview:

"I know there are going to be a bunch of forum comments and editorials saying, "OMG Nintendo is doomed!" but the truth is that Nintendo's indie program is in good hands. It was never really just me. There is a large group of people working on helping developers through the process and they're going to continue doing that. My understanding is that they are planning on back-filling my role. Before leaving, I put together a list of people I thought would be good candidates for the job and would be happy to provide any input they want. Having the right person in that role will be critical for the long-term health of the business, and I'm sure they're going to get someone great."