Nintendo Indie Developers Lose Dan Adelman As Indie Program Runner

Nintendo Indie Developers lost Dan Adelman as the Indie program runner at Nintendo of America. In a tweet from Adelman’s personal Twitter account, he confirmed that he reached an arrangement with Nintendo of America which included his no longer working there.

Happy to announce I reached an arrangement w/ @NintendoAmerica whereby I can tweet again. Arrangement includes my not working there anymore.

— Dan Adelman (@Dan_Adelman) August 4, 2014

As a Japanese company, Nintendo has something of an iron curtain around it, giving an air of mystery with rather unfriendly overtones to those unfamiliar with the management style. The message is always a corporate one, never individual, which is a long standing practice for traditionally managed Japanese companies.

Nintendo of America and Europe have always functioned as a reflection of the Nintendo of Japan offices, making jobs for those on our side of the Pacific rather tenuous. This is something Brandon Sheffield of Gamasutra experienced first hand when attempting to reach Dan Adelman for an interview back in April of 2014 with the purpose of drawing attention to some of the Nintendo indie developers.

The series detailed how the three console platform holders were courting the highly coveted indie space, and Sony and Microsoft were all too happy to give interviews with their respective heads, while Nintendo declined.

Commenting on the restrictions Dan Adelman was placed under in the Gamasutra piece, Sheffield stated.

“I don’t blame Adelman. I know him, and I know this is the kind of thing he would like to do. It wasn’t his decision. It’s Nintendo’s policy not to privilege the individual. It’s Nintendo’s policy to keep messaging corporate, not personal. These policies originate all the way up in the Japanese office, as staff members continually tell me, but this approach is not the way of things today, and it shows how far behind Nintendo is in terms of its relationship with third party developers, and how it operates as a company: keeping everyone in check, rather than letting innovation and new ideas lead, as its executives keep saying they want to. It shows how far the company still has to go to prove to indies that we should be putting our games on its platform.”

The unfortunate road to losing Adelman as an advocate for Nintendo indie developers started with a series of tweets Adelman made directly to Nintendo fans regarding the treatment of indie games, specifically the requirements for indie developers to work out of an office instead of their houses.

Other issues included the region-locking for certain games released on the Nintendo platforms. Nintendo of Japan told Adelman to stop tweeting altogether unless his posts followed the company line. He elected to go silent, according to Kotaku, who originally ran the story of Adelman’s departure from Nintendo of America.

“I had been strongly encouraged to stay off of Twitter—or at least say only things that were clearly safe—so after the region-locking comment they just said I needed to stop completely,” Adelman said. “When people started complaining that I wasn’t active on Twitter anymore, it was suggested that a PR person could just post in my name. I thought that was about the worst idea I’d ever heard, so I left it as is and let the silence speak for itself.”

So where does this leave Nintendo in regards to its relationship to indie developers? One thing is for certain, Nintendo needs software to sell its platforms. Even with the boost of Wii U sales due to Mario Kart 8, as we reported previously, the forthcoming Super Smash Bros. titles for 3DS and Wii U, the 3DS are continuing to show a downward trend, and the Wii U is estimated to have only sold six million units as of April.

While Nintendo has enough cash to see it through a disastrous console cycle thanks to the runaway success of the original Wii, Nintendo has to turn the boat around, and that tiller won’t move significantly without third parties.

It is an old horse that has been beaten to death in the gaming media. Nintendo is a very closed shop with indifference toward third party developers such as EA, 2K and Acitivision. Even Ubisoft, the publishing champion of new technology for games stopped releasing on the Wii U due to less than stellar market penetration figures.

While Nintendo figures out its next move with indie developers, something Adelman states clearly is still being helmed by people who care deeply about indie games within Nintendo of America, Dan is going indie himself with the goal of answering the question of “How can we steer the economics of the industry in a way that talented developers making an amazing game won’t feel like the only two possible outcomes are becoming super rich or broke?”

Image Sources | Dan Adleman.com & Shutterstock