SteamWorld Dig developers says Nintendo is caught up on the indie market

With the Wii U and 3DS, [Nintendo] started to realise that they had to get with the times. Publishing for Nintendo consoles has been, in the past, not a nightmare, but pretty close. They make sure every QA gate is good enough. It takes months, and you have to do that for every region, and if you fail, it takes even longer. You have to get a new slot, and release dates are pushed back.

But with the Switch, we only have to make one version and only have one launch – and that’s one version for the entire world, so we’ll have the same version in the US, Europe and a little bit later, Japan and China as well. That saves so much work. It means we can do the translations ourselves, we don’t have to have a new publisher for one specific region – it’s going to be so much easier. They’re basically taking the Steam or App Store approach: one version of the game for the entire world.

From what I’ve seen, just using Nintendo’s publishing tools to set up everything from sales to getting the name right on the eShop, everything like that, it’s much more streamlined and more modern. Even Nintendo’s approach to how they get new indies to join the Switch family – nowadays, they see a good game at a convention and they just walk straight up to them and ask them to develop for Switch. From what I know, they’ve never done that before, so I think they are getting with the times. They know more than anyone what they did wrong with the Wii U, and 3DS in some cases as well, and they really want to fix that.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/04/07/steamworld-dig-developers-says-nintendo-is-caught-up-on-the-indie-market/