Nintendo: We're trying to do a better job of reaching out to indies

- Nintendo's indies guy Dan Adelman discusses the need for his company to change its closed vibe. Nintendo's developer policies up until recently revolved around keeping the processes very secretive, but the company has recently been changing how it works with developers, in a bid to attract more indies. Talking to GameSpot, Adelman admitted that this has been slow-going. When asked about the company's secretive methods, he responded, "I think that's something we're guilty of rather than something we want to boast about. And that's something that we're actually trying to change." "We kind of historically have presented ourselves as very -- what's the right word -- monolithic is probably not the vibe I'm going for. But it's a very uniform company," he added. "Like 'this is the company's stance.'" Over the last year or so, Nintendo has been broadcasting its Nintendo Direct shows online, with president Satoru Iwata presenting the company as a more personal entity -- and this has been just one part of Nintendo's bid to put a face on its company and attract both players and developers. "So I think we're trying to do a better job at that outreach and breaking down this idea that there's something behind those locked gates and no one can see what it is," Adelman noted. On curation of the Nintendo eShop itself, Adelman said, "We've always maintained the position that we don't want to have any kind of concept approval or greenlight process where people have to spend their time and energy on pitching us on a game. We don't want to be the arbiters of what we think is the best games and we're only going to show that." Yet at the same time, Nintendo says it has made a lot of investment into how the eShop looks and feels compared to the company's past online stores, and therefore keeping up the quality of the games is crucial. "Developers can play a role in that as well now that they're able to - we've changed our business model with the start of the Wii U generation to make it so the developers can set their own price point, they can change their price whenever they want," Adelman noted. "So if the developer is putting their game on sale, we want to make sure that's visible to consumers. We do have a good solid volume of content, but it's not overwhelmingly so."