Nintendo has been working very hard to make game development on the Wii U for indies easy (in a complete turnaround in their stance since the Wii and DSi days)- not only did they institute the Nintendo Web Framework, which allows developers an environment within which they can develop using CSS, JavaScript, and HTML5, but last year they also announced a partnership with Unity, which would bring the popular engine to the platform, and be included for free wit Wii U dev kits.
Nintendo talked about that last point during GDC to Siliconera– specifically, about how developers had jumped on board to develop Wii U games thanks to Nintendo’s Unity initiatives.
“Over the course of this show, we have nine games on display,” Damon Baker, Senior Manager of Marketing at Nintendo’s of America’s Licensing department, said. “We have 17 that are currently in the pipeline, that have been submitted. So they will all be out within the next two months.”
“And then, we have another fifty that are waiting in the wings, that are coming; so we’ve got a lot of Unity content on the way.”
Mainstream developers and publishers have all but abandoned the Wii U- but it is good to see that, similar to the PS Vita, the console is finding a new lease of life with the indies.