Nintendo Okie

Here’s another in the long line of evidence that Nintendo really does care about the digital store fronts of their consoles.  The 3DS is doing well with the eShop, they’re going to be releasing their own retail games through digital stores and now this.  An anonymous source speaking to Wii U Daily said that Nintendo is going to offer crazy incentives for developers and publishers to offer their games through the eShop for the 3DS and the Wii U.  This source has been right before, proclaiming that Nintendo was going to be bringing some sort of achievement system to the Wii U, which we know to be true.

“They’re offering insane incentives for publishers to sell retail games as downloads on the console. You’d be stupid not to take advantage of it and go retail box-only.  The new platform is perfect for indie devs, it’s a whole different ball game than WiiWare. They’ve learned a lot from that mess.”

What those incentives are is unclear at this time.  We know the sales thresholds for the WiiWare service were pretty unfriendly towards developers.  Games had to reach a certain milestone, 6000 sales, before devs even saw a penny.  Hopefully this new digital push will mean developers and publishers will want to put their games on the eShop.  Nintendo could be out front of both Sony and Microsoft by having this ready for Wii U on day one.  Sony does offer something like this for the Vita, but nothing of the sort is available for the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3.

Of course, all of this is moot if there aren’t reasons for gamers to buy their games through the eShop.  If the digital version of the game costs the same as a retail copy, there isn’t really much reason to choose digital over a boxed store apart from convenience.  Nintendo needs to make sure the prices of the game are lower in the eShop, 10-20% lower, if they want people to buy them.  Gamers need to know their game can be, at least temporarily, downloaded on another person’s system as long as they’re signed in to their account.   It appears Nintendo is going to give the people making the games a reason, but consumers also need the carrot on a stick for this whole initiative to work.