You're probably asking "why hasn't the multi-million selling Binding of Isaac appeared on the Nintendo 3DS eShop yet and will it ever arrive?" It doesn't look like it. According to reps for Nintendo, the game steps over the boundaries of Nintendo's tolerance for religious material, and thus, the game won't be arriving on Nintendo's eShop.
It seems like the Big 'N' always takes a step forward in one way and a step back in another, in this case it's an obvious step back, depending on how you view their position on games tackling religious material.
According to IGN, Nintendo of America's head of business development, Dan Adelman, told them that...
“It kind of kills me...it kills me right now that I had to make that phone call.” … “We carve out some categories of content we don’t allow,”...”Religious themes is one of those topics. And so it was deemed to be in violation of that.”
Ouch.
I wonder who brought the ban hammer down? I imagine Reggie was like “My body is ready... for the Binding of Isaac” and Iwata was like “This... is... for you!” and then Miyamoto came in and was like “WTF is this? This game ain't coming to my crib. GTFO!” and that was it.
It seems a little odd that Nintendo has recently been working so hard to bring a wide variety of indie games to their platforms but then turn around and say “Nope!” to a game that's already promised to be a success because it's already a success, before and without Nintendo.
These are the kind of decisions, I think, that could really hamper the Big 'N' from capitalizing on the current movement shifting and rolling through game culture right now. They really need to step up and better curate – and not just axe every game that doesn't seem to fit within their ruleset that worked during the SNES or Wii era.
Whether Nintendo likes it or not, they're in a fight right now for the core gamer and they'll need every single piece of software they can get their hands on to stay ahead of the competition.
However, it's not all walled gardens and prison stockades. Adelman notes that Nintendo's continued resilience to adapt to market changes may not see their antiquated policies in place forever, noting...
“We’re definitely open to revisiting [policies] from time to time,” … “What we need to do is be a bit more flexible sometimes as far as interpreting those guidelines and making exceptions where they do make sense. But we’re a large company. We’re kind of going through some of our own growing pains in that regard."
To balance this out at least Nintendo waived some fees and has offered free development tools to registered developers. As for everything else regarding content policy? Well, good luck Nintendo finding your way through the minefield of your own policies. I really hope you can do away with the ones that only hurt you and your potential audience.
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