Independent Living

Inside Nintendo's drive without over-saturating its market place.

Come January 2019, 12 years after its launch, the server switch for the Wii Shop Channel, Nintendo’s first attempt at establishing a digital shopfront for indie games, will be flicked, and the shop will fizzle from existence. It is less of a loss than you might imagine. The Wii Shop’s shelves are relatively sparse: Nintendo has lagged far behind its contemporary rivals when it comes to courting and keeping indie talent. For a few golden years between 2008 and 2013 scores of game-makers, through an indefinable combination of luck and talent, made their fortunes with indie titles. None did so, however, thanks to Nintendo and its afterthought of a digital storefront.

However, Switch, that diminutively disruptive force of nature, has changed all of that. While the shelves of Sony and Microsoft’s mature digital stores sag under the weight of so many games, players are increasingly attracted to the Switch’s eShop for its favourable signal-to-noise ratio. For indie developers, meanwhile, the Switch, with its vast audience desperate for games to play between EPD titans, offers the best hope of their game being noticed in the indie swamp that is 2018. “There are just so many games on Steam,” says Martin Brouard, co-founder of the Montreal-based studio Sabotage, whose debut release, The Messenger, will come first to Nintendo’s console. “But because it’s a step harder to release on Switch, there’s a natural barrier, which in turn makes discoverability easier.”