According to Frozenbyte, the developer behind Trine 2: Director’s Cut, Nintendo has relaxed their policy on Wii U eShop games and is letting publishers set their own price points.
Frozenbyte marketing manager Mikael Haveri confirmed the good (and extremely surprising) news to IGN, saying:
“That’s what we love about the new [Wii U] eShop. We have the power to price our products as we please, with just some basic guidelines from the big guys. 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…”
“They have pushed away all of the old methods that have been established before. 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. For indie developers this is huge.”
When you consider that Nintendo is the company that pioneered the iron-fisted video game console business model with the NES, it’s extremely shocking that they are giving publishers this much control over their products on the Wii U eShop. Additionally, letting developers patch their software without having to pay a re-certification fee will allow the new console to avoid the issues surrounding the Fez XBLA patch.
Nintendo still has a lot to prove when it comes to the Wii U‘s online infrastructure, but I’m extremely impressed with how forward thinking they are with the pricing aspect of the Wii U eShop. Hopefully this is just the first sign of more good things to come.
Source: Destructiod