Nintendo & Digital Sales Data Secrecy

Following on from my end of year review of our self-published numbers to date, it has been an interesting couple of days. To re-cap, the figures included our sales and free units downloaded for all of our games since we started self-publishing, including the numbers for our WiiWare games.

Yesterday Nintendo got in touch to ask us to remove the figures for the WiiWare titles from the blog. Apparently they don’t allow developers to publish the sales numbers of their self-published titles.

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? It is a tricky one – and incredibly unfair and damaging to indie developers publishing on Nintendo stores.

I don’t believe Nintendo are necessary alone in this policy, but I believe they are by far the most draconian in enforcing it. I have seen many different reports from developers for games on XBLA, PSN, Steam and so on with details of sales figures, but never anything for a Nintendo store.

So why do I believe this is such a negative, damaging policy? I shall explain…

Business & Financial Planning

Every traditional game publisher out there considers carefully their release plan; they consult sales data to see which titles perform the best, which genres are popular, which platform offers the greatest returns, and so on. This data helps to build a release and development strategy. Without the data they would not be able to make a considered decision and would have to hope for the best with each and every title they release. Not really a sound way to run a business!

Access to Finance

Imagine going into a Bank, VC, Business Angel or some other source of finance and saying – we’re planning this game(s) for Nintendo’s download service and we need to raise finance to help with the costs. The first thing they would ask would be to see detailed sales projections and market research. What do you do? Look down at your feet and mumble apologetically that Nintendo don’t allow any numbers to be shared so you really have no idea how well it will perform, but you hope it’ll do really good? Do you have any hope of raising finance – no, of course you don’t.

Job Security

Any decent studio owner wants to offer their employees a stable working environment; a job with prospects and opportunities for the future. Of course no-one can guarantee this, but without any form of realistic forecasting and planning the chances of offering job security are next to none.

Essentially Nintendo’s policy does its best to prevent often vulnerable indie studios from building and running stable businesses. It projects all of the risk back to the developer, stops them gaining access to funding to help grow their business and essentially makes self-publishing on Nintendo platforms a huge gamble.

And let’s not forget that Nintendo also don’t allow you to ever alter the price of your title, run any sort of promotion, offer demos or indeed use any of the other tools that publishers traditionally use to maximise sales and extend the longevity of revenue earned per title.

Sure – releasing any game is a risk, but the more sales & user data you can access the more carefully you can formulate a development strategy. If you don’t have access to any data at all, it is impossible to run a business with any degree of forward planning or forecasting. Try running that past a business advisor or mentor – they would shake their head and strongly advise against it.

So, to conclude – 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?

Posted by Rich in News/Blog. This post has 4 Comments.

About the Author

I am the Head of Development at Icon. I am also the 'in-house' art, design and audio guy.

4 Comments for Nintendo & Digital Sales Data Secrecy

Seth
January 6, 2012 at 4:04 am

I wholeheartedly agree. This policy is a load of bull. It’s already a gamble to develop for Wii to begin with, what with the terrible software sales most third party developers face on Wii, case in point EA Sports. They’re just about resistant to developing for Wii any more due to the flops they’ve had with past Madden titles and the like on the platform. This only makes things worse. They seem to want to develop a better relationship with third parties with 3DS and likely Wii U, yet they pull crap like this? How are any third parties, indie or not, supposed to feel comfortable with that?

Sony has gone on the record to state that Nintendo’s knack for cutting out indie developers is a huge mistake. For once, Nintendo, take their advice.

Nintendo’s made a long list of bad decisions which I don’t agree with, and this only adds to it. It’s because of decisions like these that I myself am resistant to even purchasing a Nintendo platform ever again.
Geoff
January 6, 2012 at 3:03 pm

Good to see Sony allow this, for now, as digital becomes more prevalent, publishers will have to produce the numbers for accurate sales charts and consumer confidence.

G.
John
January 6, 2012 at 11:27 pm

I think their point with not allowing promotions or deals etc is that they don’t want to see a race to the bottom happening like what happened on iOS which would devalue more expensively produced games.

Nintendo pretty much follow the same rules themselves. Mario Kart and others always retains their price for years. If a game is worth 10 dollars on day 1 then it should still be worth 10 dollars 1 year later and this is especially true with digital titles as there is no such thing as shelf space or physical media distribution effectively forcing older titles to be withdrawn freeing up space for newer ones.

Maybe you just priced your games a bit too high?

As for your main point regarding sales figures. Apples and Oranges, I could make a game that looks and plays like Angry Birds but I suspect it’s not going to sell 100s of millions of copies, nor do I think a funder would think so either I know I’m using an extreme case but as a developer and a gamer you should have a notion of how well your game will do, sales data is interesting and I agree funders do like that kind of information but ultimately it comes down to quality and they’ll also like to see evidence of that as well (even if it means getting their kids to play it).

Basically It’s not the platform (except for the lack of deals etc) e.g. I suspect that Pullblox on the 3DS will do very well although I suppose we’ll never know
Rich
January 7, 2012 at 11:35 am

Hi John – regarding the access to sales data.

I think it would be good to clarify this; I actually have first-hand experience of trying to obtain finance with no figures to show, and this highlights the point:

During 2010 we approached several banks to request some bridge finance to cover the gap between the release of the titles and the time when the sales thresholds were reached. On any other service this would not have been an issue as you earn revenue from sales straight away.

We showed them our own figures which showed promising early sales, but the thing is those figures are fairly meaningless – especially to a bank.

They wanted to get a view of the wider picture – how other games on the service had performed, how well games within specific genres perform, and so on. The sort of data any financial institution requires before providing funding – especially to a games company, as the games industry is perceived as being a high risk industry.

We couldn’t show them any such numbers and their response was negative – in effect I was asking them to finance a business but providing them with none of the traditional market research data they expect.

It was impossible to secure the finance we needed and as a result we had to let one of the team go and were unable to pay wages to the rest of the team for a while. Fortunately the guys stood by us, and our Minis releases then turned things around a little.

I have spoken to other developers too who have very similar stories, and some of whom didn’t make it through.