Nintendo facing moral dilemma, may lose support from smaller third parties

There’s a reason why good Nintendo Wii titles mostly come from Nintendo, and according to veteran game developer Jon Hare, it’s because Nintendo is limiting third parties with its approval process. As a result, he says that the industry giant is facing a moral dilemma over relationships with developers. Learn more at the full article.

It’s no secret that the Nintendo Wii’s software sales is dominated by Nintendo titles, but what only a few of us know is that third party publishers are actually having a tough time in dishing out games for the console as Nintendo faces a moral dilemma over developer relations. Veteran game developer and Nikitova Games director of development Jon Hare had something to say regarding this issue.

Hare commented on Nintendo’s software dominance:

Good for Nintendo, they have always been the best developer in the world in any case. It is just a shame that this time they had to put so many other publishers and developers noses out of joint in order to ensure that their titles received such high priority on their hardware formats.

This is due to delays in manufacturing of third party products and approval processes that have a negative impact on product quality, he said. It’s not a special case though, because he didn’t count Sony and Microsoft out in lacking smoother procedures.

Hare believes the platform holders are fortunate since there are no international laws that “force them to open up their platforms as free technical platforms such as VHS, DVD or Stereo.” He continued, “personally I feel it is no coincidence that the quality of sequelled, non-licensed original software has gone down ever since controlled platforms became the norm in the mid ’90s.”

When all is said and done, Hare thinks Nintendo “now faces a moral dilemma.” Talking about Nintendo, he said:

Does it revert to type and admit that it doesn’t really care very much about the rest of the world after all, or does it properly embrace working with third parties and all the extra demand that this brings? Either way if it does not improve on what happened at the end of this year in regard to working with smaller third parties it may find that support for its platforms will start to thin out again from the smaller developers and publishers.

But then again maybe that is exactly what they want in order to maintain the hallmark of quality on which their reputation is built.