According to a report from Icon Games, who’re responsible for several mobile, PC, PSP and Wiiware games like Bashi Blocks and Arcade Air Hockey, Nintendo isn’t very happy about their publication of their sales figures on their website.
In a blog posting on his company website, Icon’s Richard hill-Whittall broke down Icon’s sales figures for the year, separated by platform. Realizing that he’d moved 255, 763 copies of Icon’s games, he thought it would be an excellent exercise to display the effectiveness of each platform. Nintendo quickly moved to request those figures be removed however, to which Hill-Whittall responded in a separate entry yesterday.
“As to why, I can’t really be sure – are they scared to reveal how their online services perform or do they just dislike developers being able to run effective businesses?” Hill-Whittall wrote. “It is a tricky one – and incredibly unfair and damaging to indie developers publishing on Nintendo stores.”
Icon Games did comply with Nintendo’s request, but did not change their total figures, nor removed the other figures from the other platforms. So simple math gets you a total of 40,810 units on Wiiware (68,262 for iTunes and 146,691 on PlayStation Network respectively) and puts Wiiware sales at a distant third place among their platforms.
Hill-Whitall calls Nintendo’s policy damaging to independent developers, claiming “Nintendo’s policy actively makes life as difficult as possible for the smaller studios, putting jobs and livelihoods at risk. Without transparency of digital sales data developers are perpetually in the dark.
“How long are indie studios supposed to put up with this sort of thing – is it too much to ask to be treated with respect and allowed to run a business in a professional manner?”
[source] Icon Games
This does not surprise me at all.
I remember this from a while back too - Nintendo's wiiware policies about disclosure are incredibly strict. And if I remember as well, anyone who puts a game up there that sells less than a certain number of copies (I want to say 5000 but that doesn't sound right) gets absolutely none of the profit. Nintendo takes 100% until that number is hit.
I honestly can't imagine why any small developer would want to develop stuff for the Wii.
I wonder if the E-Shop/DSiWare is any better. So far the only really interesting game I've seen there is Pushmo. The rest of that service is a dumping ground for shovelware and iOS ports that cost four times as much.