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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Nintendo will never be "third party friendly"

NoirSon on 28 December 2014

Honestly, Nintendo is pretty 3rd party friendly... to some.

They have been uber friendly with a lot of long running major Japanese developers in more then a few ways. They seem to have gotten more friendly with some smaller developers that prove their salt in some games and at times absorb them into the Nintendo fold. But even now, while they aren't as active in the past, Nintendo seems to have good relationships with the likes of Bandai Namco (or Namco Bandai), Sega, Koei Temco (although that might be because Nintendo co-owns Fatal Frame from the looks of things) and even Capcom to a degree.

They are less friendly with so major Western third parties, whether this is because of the language barrier, economics, some long held grudge over previous treatment, the perception of Nintendo being a competitor for sales on the devices or whatever, you see it.

Weirdly enough the two Western publishers you could say Nintendo had the best relationships with until midway through the Wii life cycle or recently were UBI Soft and EA. Time will tell if any future success can ever heal the rift between the companies given how badly things have gotten.



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teigaga on 28 December 2014
Multishanks said:

I have been seeing a lot of wishful thinking about Nintendo's next hardware being third party friendly as some like to call it.

STOP DOING THIS TO YOURSELVES. They will never be that because their business model doesn't include that.

Even when they had the most successful consoles, some of which had plenty of third party games, they were NOT "third party friendly". Examples in clude the NES, SNES and Wii. 

From what Nintendo has stated recently that is not going to change. Miyamoto recently revealed that Nintendo's internal studios, remember this, have begun design work on the next hardware. Not too suprising really. However, a lot of people are feeling that this will be "third party friendly" due to unconfirmed rumours. 

You know what is confirmed? That Nintendo will be consulting their own internal studios and not third party publishers. So stop doing this to yourselves. Just wait to see what it turns out to ve and judge accordingly.

I don't think Nintendo are as daft as you think, they do adjust each generation. First parties having the first say doesn't mean much,  no one is expecting nintendo to make a system solely for 3rd parties. Its the first parties that make Nintendo relevant.

The Wii U was made poorly becuase Nintendo overestimated the loyalty to wii brand. They had the same level of arrogance sony had after the PS3. HD tick, Mario at launch tick, new gimmicky controller tick.... To them that meant a successful system.

Moving forward Nintendo will acknowledge:

1. The casual/non gamer market is fickle 
2. Software revenue is their backbone.
3. Third party content really sells systems.
4. They cannot internally produce enough content to satisfy users on both their platforms.

Now I don't know what they're gonna do next but I think they wil look at the following.

1.
   -Not gamble on expensive controller interfaces unless they really have huge sales potential (system specs are a safer bet for their investment)
   -Drop the Wii name
2. Sacrifice shorterm profitability on hardware to build a healthy userbase and enable software sales to peak. 
3. X86 achitecture
4. Not launch the system til they can support it with a strong year of software

To me this equates to  being 3rd party friendly.