Nintendo Wii U offers indie-friendly eShop, says Frozenbyte

Nintendo's eShop for Wii U offers indepdent developers more options for selling their titles, according to Trine 2: Director's Cut developer Frozenbyte. The game is one of the indie titles currently populating the Wii U eShop. Frozenbyte marketing manager Mikeal Haveri told IGN that developers are allowed to set their own prices and sale times on the eShop.

"That's what we love about the new eShop," said Haveri. "We have the power to price our products as we please, with just some basic guidelines from the big guys. The step to this is purely from Nintendo's side and they clearly see that [their] previous installments have not been up to par. We can set our own pricing and actually continuing on that by setting our own sales whenever we want. It is very close to what Apple and Steam are doing at the moment, and very indie friendly."

Microsoft has come under fire for the exorbitant fees it charges all developers to patch games on Xbox Live. The fees led Polytron to decline releasing a patch for Fez, despite an issue which would corrupt some users' save games.

"Nintendo messed up the worst last time around," said Haveri. "Now they really know that they have to make a huge improvement to get back into the game. What I have seen and heard so far is amazing and it's definitely going in the right direction as far as small developers are concerned."

"They have pushed away all of the old methods that have been established before. Simply put they've told us that there are no basic payments for each patch (which were pretty high on most platforms) and that we can update our game almost as much as we want. For indie developers this is huge."