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Nintendo's indie spokesman leaves company
Nintendo's digital distribution business development manager Dan Adelman, who was the indie outreach specialist for the company, has left the company. Adelman was banned from Twitter by Nintendo last year for showing sympathy for gamers frustrated by region locking, something that didn't fall within the company's strict messaging. Gamasutra detailed it quite well in April, properly pointing out, "It's Nintendo's policy not to privilege the individual. It's Nintendo's policy to keep messaging corporate, not personal." "I had been strongly encouraged to stay off of Twitter-or at least say only things that were clearly safe-so after the region-locking comment they just said I needed to stop completely," Adelman told Kotaku. "When people started complaining that I wasn't active on Twitter anymore, it was suggested that a PR person could just post in my name. I thought that was about the worst idea I'd ever heard, so I left it as is and let the silence speak for itself." Adelman will remain in the industry and assist indies in areas of business development and consulting.
Nintendo's indie guy on opening the gates for developers
Nintendo is the Willy Wonka chocolate factory of the gaming world. The products that roll out of Nintendo's doors are whimsical and wildly different than what leaves Microsoft or Sony's factories. Nintendo creates games and consoles in a secret vacuum of ergonomic white walls and strict NDAs, with rooms populated by fantastical creatures and short, foreign men with mustaches and overalls. At least, that's an apt analogy that one developer recently made about Nintendo, the company's Business Development Manager, Dan Adelman, tells me. He's Nintendo's indie outreach specialist, and for years he's been scouting potential developers for Wii, 3DS and Wii U, and he's been a part of the company's recent evolution into what he hopes is a more open, transparent distributor. Picture Willy Wonka's glass elevator. "Historically, Nintendo has seemed kind of hard to approach, kind of like there's a closed system where if a developer already knows somebody at Nintendo or has some kind of 'in,' they're in, but otherwise there's no way to interface with the company," Adelman says. "I think we're putting a lot of effort into changing that and making ourselves more accessible, so I really want to make sure that people realize that it's actually pretty easy now – and we're trying to make it easier – to work with us and release games on our systems." If Adelman is Wonka, he wants every developer to get a Golden Ticket.
Nintendo opening eShop purchasing on PC and mobile devices
Nintendo will add the ability to purchase eShop games on PCs and smartphones, according to Nintendo's Business Development Manager Dan Adelman. While Adelman tells Joystiq he's not "personally directly involved" with the project, he confirmed that players will be able to "log onto the site and set [purchases] up for download so that once they get home, it'll be available for them and they can have that at their fingertips whenever they need it." Adelman's confirmation follows a NicoNico report with translation provided by Siliconera that notes the system will be open to PC and smartphone users later this year.
Nintendo's new, relaxed restrictions for eShop indies
One rule that kept some indie developers off of WiiWare and DSiWare was that Nintendo required its developers to have a physical office space. That rule is "a thing of the past," eShop business development manager Dan Adelman told Gamasutra. It was originally in place to make sure dev kits and confidential information was kept secure."More and more people are working from home, and we recognize that developers are forming virtual teams around the world," Adelman said, so it became necessary to reevaluate the rule to make the Wii U and 3DS eShops more attractive to indie developers. "We really have only a few requirements to sign up as a licensed developer with Nintendo," he summarized. "The most notable ones are that you have to have some experience making games, you have to be able to keep any confidential materials like dev kits secure and you have to form a company. None of these should be prohibitive to any indie developer." Furthermore, becoming a licensed developer lets you release your games on the eShop anywhere in the Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Europe regions.In other welcome news, the sales threshold – which kept developers from earning any money on their games until they'd sold 6,000 units – is also gone. Originally conceived as a measure to force developers to "self-police their own game quality" in the absence of publishers, it led to unintended consequences. "The threshold was thought to be a convenient way to go about it," Adelman explained. "Unfortunately, some great games that just didn't find an audience wound up being penalized. So for all systems after WiiWare -- DSiWare, Nintendo 3DS eShop, and Wii U eShop, we decided to get rid of the thresholds altogether. Developers receive revenue from unit 1."
