The status of Nintendo Switch as the main indie platform is strengthening every month. The other day, Nintendo’s top managers announced that they consider the indie scene an integral part of the Switch gaming environment and will work to ensure that 20-30 new independent projects appear on the platform every week.
Like any console, the main advantage of the Nintendo Switch is exclusive games. But the company also needs to take care that there are a lot of titles and the audience of players expands, said Tatsumi Kimishima, president of the company.
“That’s why we are creating an environment in which it will be easier to develop games for Nintendo Switch and publish them on the platform. As a result, there is a large audience of people who play indie games on the Nintendo Switch,” Kimishima said.
Hollow Knight is a fresh success story of an indie title on Switch. In the first two weeks, the game earned $3.7 million.
Nintendo CEO Shinya Takahashi added that creating such an environment was one of the company’s goals when developing the platform itself.:
“The fruit of this work is a lot of indie games, especially from Europe and North America. But we don’t think of indies as competitors to our own large-scale projects. Rather, indie games are what generally fuels the Nintendo Switch.”
Susumu Tanaka, the company’s senior executive director, also noted that the focus on supporting indie projects has been developed since the days of the Nintendo Wii:
“For the Nintendo Switch, we have created an environment with support for the Unity engine, which is used on smartphones and other platforms. We are also actively attracting indie developers to participate in events that we organize in different regions.”
In conclusion, Tatsumi Kimishima announced that the company is now moving to ensure that the number of games for Switch has reached from 1200 to one and a half thousand: “I think this gives you an idea of how much the platform has grown.”
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