What’s going on with third-party games for 3DS ⊟
Nintendo has had difficulty attracting third-party games – games produced by other developers and publishers – to its consoles for years now. The company’s president Satoru Iwata acknowledged that reputation at last week’s Investors’ Q&A, but he also shed some light on where Nintendo is at right now with courting other companies to make games for 3DS.
“If you consider the Japanese market, it is fair to say that the number one dedicated video game system that Japanese third-party publishers are focusing on is Nintendo 3DS,” he said. “This is because Nintendo 3DS has an overwhelmingly strong presence in the hardware as well as software markets for dedicated game systems, meaning that it would be illogical not to do business on Nintendo 3DS, and we are cooperating with third-party publishers in a variety of ways as long as we can establish win-win relationships.”
While the DS and 3DS have done a good job attracting major Japanese companies like Level-5 and Atlus, the same can’t be said in the West, where outside of a few small studios like Renegade Kid and WayForward, we don’t see much third-party development. Iwata argues that’s because most publishers on our side of the globe specialize in making games for high-end home consoles.
The executive believes that can change, though: “The fact that Nintendo 3DS has now sold over 10 million units in both the U.S. and Europe seems to be news for third-party publishers, and we have recently been receiving more proposals from third-party publishers.” But don’t expect that growing interest to immediately translate into a slew of releases. “While [publishers] are very interested in Nintendo 3DS, it appears that they are currently investigating what they want to develop on our platform,” Iwata added.
He also repeated Nintendo’s interest in publishing more third-party games from Japan in the West, similar to its arrangements with Square Enix for Bravely Default and Dragon Quest’s DS releases: “We sometimes distribute, or even publish depending on the circumstances, games that were made by Japanese software publishers in the overseas markets, and you can expect to see more examples of this this year and the next.”
We’ve heard Nintendo make that promise before and deliver on it to a limited extent – hopefully we’ll see those efforts multiplied. The photo from E3 2010 used above, by the way, comes from Destructoid.
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