Frozenbyte: Wii U indies set their own eShop prices, sale dates
Nintendo overhauled more than just its controller with the Wii U – it also revamped how it handles indie developers and eShop games. Frozenbyte (Trine 2) marketing manager Mikael Haveri tells IGN that Nintendo's foray into modern distribution puts it on par with established companies such as Steam and Apple.
"We have the power to price our products as we please, with just some basic guidelines from the big guys," Haveri says. "The step to this is purely from Nintendo's side and they clearly see that [their] previous installments have not been up to par. We can set our own pricing and actually continuing on that by setting our own sales whenever we want. It is very close to what Apple and Steam are doing at the moment, and very indie friendly."
Developers don't need to pay to patch their games on Wii U, either. Recently Fez developer Polytron called out XBLA for charging "tens of thousands of dollars" for patches following the first, free one. Nintendo's infinitely free patching could be a large draw for indies.
"Simply put, they've told us that there are no basic payments for each patch (which were pretty high on most platforms) and that we can update our game almost as much as we want," Haveri says. "For indie developers this is huge."
