Team Meat’s Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes have publicly offered to a pretty interesting business deal to Nintendo. If The Big N puts the developer’s Super Meat Boy character in the roster of the next Super Smash Bros., the duo will make sure that the Wii U gets a version of their upcoming “cat lady sim”, Mew-Genics.
Speaking to Eurogamer, McMillen and Refenes talked a lot about the legal and financial hoops that console manufacture’s (especially Microsoft) make developers jump though to release games on their respective platforms.
“A couple years ago it was definitely worth it [releasing games on services like XBLA]… because that was the only outlet. But that’s not the only outlet anymore and those seem to be the more difficult outlets than just contacting Steam.”
“The overhead cost of just developing for those consoles is insane,” Refenes added. “It costs zero dollars to develop on Steam if you already have a computer. When you look at PlayStation and Xbox and Nintendo you have to buy thousand dollar dev kits and pay for certification and pay for testing and pay for localisation.”
Even though Team Meat is clearly wary of getting back into console game development, both McMillen and Refenes agreed that there is one thing that would guarantee a Wii U version of Mew-Genics. Nintendo would have to agree to include Super Meat Boy in Super Smash Bros.
“I want Meat Boy to be in Smash Bros,” McMillen said. “That would be the one reason I’d really want to develop for a Nintendo console… Nintendo are you listening? Smash Bros! We would ask for nothing in return. Just f***ing use the character. Put him in the game. It’s free!”
Refenes then chimed in, saying “That would be amazing! If they could guarantee us Meat Boy would be in Smash Bros., we would do something.” He later added, “If they wanted Mew-Genics or something and they could promise us Meat Boy would be in the game we’d develop Mew-Genics for them. Not exclusively, of course. This is how they would buy it from us. And that’s a very cheap price.”
Looks like the Mew-Genics yarn ball is now in Nintendo’s court. Hopefully, The Big N has become as indie friendly with the Wii U as recent reports have suggested. In my view, having both Mew-Genics on the Nintendo eShop and Super Meat Boy in the next Super Smash Bros. is a win-win situation for everyone involved.
