I just want them to be friendlier to indie devs. It's better, but not ideal. Nintendo has interesting control schemes and game design could benefit from being able to experiment with them in the form of game jams or smaller niche titles.
Is there a similar program for 3DS development? I looked around, but all I could find was a page that really pushed individuals to try the Wii U Developer program.[1] For anything else, it looks like Nintendo wants a real company with prior game dev experience.
Nintendo needs a better controller than WiiU, something with analog triggers. And being hostile to parts of their community (e.g. hostile to Youtube gameplay videos) should be a thing of the past. Also the NX should have a better performance than the Playstation 4, otherwise the NX will find itself in a small niche market.
The wiiu controller, despite its bizarre huge screen, was obviously an attempt to rejoin the mainstream with its conventional dual-analog 4 button 4 shoulder layout. Leaving out the analog shoulders is an odd omission.
I will point out that as interesting as this is, patents are not always an accurate clue to what a company is planning. Heck, Nintendo's patented a lot of things over the last few years or so, For example:
That said, based on my experiences with their 'gimmick' controls in the past, I wouldn't want something like this used for the NX default control scheme. Quite a few examples were just buggy as all heck.
Since we're basically saying what Nintendo should do here, I'll add in my two cents:
They should make more games. New games not just spinoffs and sequels and many of them. In fact they should limit each game series to 5 games each cycle (including spinoffs)
Give several small teams of about 7 people 2 years to finish their games. Reward the most financially successful teams with bonuses and more autonomy. Demote or retire the ones that we're not at all successful during the cycle.
Nintendo's model has always been to use a relatively small number of common characters (Mario, Kirby, etc.) with varying game mechanics. There's more fundamental differences between any two given Mario titles than there is between, say, Watch Dogs and Grand Theft Auto.
I would rather play ten high-quality Mario games with diverse mechanics than ten over-the-shoulder cover shooters where each one features a different gritty man shooting people for a different gritty reason.
While this would be a very cool formula for generating some interesting indie type games, that scale is far too small to produce anything that could compete in the AAA space.
And good luck convincing anyone that retiring Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon would be a good idea.
What they should do is wait for PS4/XB1 to come out, wait a year, then release a console with the same specs at a much cheaper price (due to economies of scale) but with Nintendo's titles and new control system. At least that way they still get the cross platform titles coming across.
It wouldn't be much cheaper. It'd likely be much more expensive. There's three components to that:
1. The prices of the competing consoles aren't static, but dropping regularly as Sony and MS get better prices for the components or finish redesigns. If anything, the competition is probably getting better economies of scale.
2. Nintendo has traditionally tried to make a profit on the hardware sales at every point in its lifecycle. Sony and MS on the other hand have been willing to sell at breakeven or even a small loss. (The loss is made up on software licensing, and lately on the yearly fees for semi-mandatory online services).
3. You want the new control systems. Well, that's going to cost you. A large part of the Xbox's failure this generation was launching with the Kinect. That added $100 to the cost, which was pretty lethal early on. The Wii U is obsolete and underpowered, but by now costs as much or more than the PS4 / Xbox One at least where I live. Why? Most likely because of the gamepad. The speculation for the NX is that the controllers are essentially handheld consoles, which will just make this worse.
