People are apparently getting excited about a little blip in the Nintendo Revolution press release that is also being interpreted as a sign that Nintendo will allow homebrew games to be uploaded and played to the upcoming console. Here’s the bit:
Freedom of design: A dynamic development architecture equally accommodates both big-budget, high-profile game “masterpieces” as well as indie games conceived by individual developers equipped with only a big idea.
If I hadn’t been at the press conference, I might parse that the same way, but it was clear from the talk that Nintendo—the company so afraid of piracy that they shut down emulator sites and made their game discs in the Gamecube spin backwards—has no intention of letting fledgling developers copy their own content to the Revolution and play it. They even mentioned a “new DRM system” at the conference (which was heralded by a lone boo), ensuring everyone that the only way to get content onto the Revolution was via one of their locked down channels (online downloads, and I’m presuming maybe in-store purchases).
Anyway, just wanted to clear that up. In no way did Nintendo imply that they’ll be letting people execute unsigned code that they made themselves on the Revolution. What they’re really saying, I think, is that they might be distributing other “indie” developers software as a publisher.
