Can Open Game Development Save Nintendo?

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles last month, Sony and Microsoft showed off new consoles and games scheduled to reach stores in time for Christmas. Nintendo’s big news at the world’s largest gaming show: its fifth round of game launch delays since October. Games drive console sales, and Nintendo’s latest system, the Wii U, hasn’t exactly been flying off the shelves. Between its November debut and the end of March, the company sold 3.45 million Wii Us, priced between $300 and $350. That’s 37 percent below its initial estimate of 5.5 million and about 40 percent behind the original Wii in the same period after its 2006 release, according to an analysis by Citigroup.

While the sales slump can be blamed in part on smartphones and tablets chipping away at the $58 billion global market for traditional video games, it’s also due to a dearth of must-play titles from the company that created Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, and the Legend of Zelda. To change that, Nintendo is doing something once unimaginable for a Japanese company: crowdsourcing game development to a network of 1.8 million programmers, including part-time hobbyists, to boost the size of its library. The company has allied with Unity Technologies, a San Francisco-based maker of software used largely to adapt casual smartphone and tablet games to various platforms. “As digital business expands, there will be even more opportunities to do business with small, independent software developers,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said in a presentation at the E3 show.