Nintendo wasn’t always the biggest advocate for indie developers. In fact, if you look at certain key eras, their “indie pickings” were a bit small, if not lackluster. Then, over time, things slowly started to change, and with the success of the Nintendo Switch (and now Switch 2), they eventually became the go-to destination for many indie games, with loads praising the publisher for helping elevate their sales more than all the other consoles and Steam combined! That eventually led to the term “Nindies,” which highlighted the collaboration between the groups. Yet, we don’t hear that term anymore, now do we?
Now, if you want to see The Big N talk about indie titles, you hear about them in the “Indie World Showcase,” as well as in certain Nintendo Directs. So, what happened? Like many insightful answers about the company, the truth can be found with former Nintendo Minute hosts Kit & Krysta, who revealed that it all came down to how the legal team told them to stop using the term:
“They made all this, but they got the tap on the shoulder from the legal team like, “You can’t do this.”
Why not, you ask? It has to do with bringing “brand names” together in a way that could set you up later for legal woes, and they used a popular (and still used by many) term to prove that:
“Yeah, Wiimote was bad. You can’t say Wiimote. Wii Remote. And definitely cannot like kind of cut the Nintendo brand in half and tack it to another word. It dilutes the brand – in the words of legal – making it so that you cannot defend your brand later on for some sort of legal dispute.
And THAT is why “Nindies” isn’t used anymore. Ironically, the person who came up with the term did fight to keep it, but eventually lost the battle. We salute your tenacity, sir!
Source: Kit & Krysta
