After Nintendo of Europe’s Laurent Fischer stepped in it last week with his careless “geeks and otaku” comment, you just knew he got a scolding behind closed doors, and that an apology of some sort was forthcoming.
Well, good news and slightly better news: it happened, and he did it with a caveat of sorts. Nintendo is apparently well on their way to addressing the Wii storage issue, but it won’t be with a hard drive.
Well, I suppose apology is the wrong word. He’s sorry I guess, but Fischer insists the comments were a joke (a bad one, reminiscent of Nintendo circa 1990′s). Perhaps to make it up to us, he teased the fact that Nintendo is “working on a solution” to the Wii’s terrible case of shrinkage (see also: Seinfeld). But don’t get too excited, as there’s “definitely there’s no plan to issue hardware,” he told GameIndustry.biz.
“We definitely detect that they [gamers] are serious and we know there is an issue in this, so it’s something that we’re working on,” he told GamesIndustry.biz. But Fischer poured cold water on rumours – stemming from recent hints dropped by Nintendo President Satoru Iwata – that the company was planning an external solution.
“Definitely there’s no plan to issue hardware, an external hard drive, but we know that we have an issue in that area,” he added. “It’s very obvious and we’re perfectly aware of it, but there’s nothing we can say beyond this.”
Pressed on what this entailed, Fischer said he was not yet privy to the details, explaining that “this area is fully handled by the development team in Japan. It’s very linked to the overall strategy; that’s something they’re working on.”
So I guess there’s only two options left, unless I’m really missing something obvious here. First, Nintendo patches the firmware, and really matures the SD card support to the point where users can seamlessly move information back and forth, and plays games off of the cards themselves. This seems inevitable, given the apparent simplicity of the update.
The second is a bit more ambitious, but certainly attainable. Basically, Nintendo goes into the cloud, a la Steam or some other similar web services-based platform. Gamers would buy games, but they wouldn’t *technically* reside on their physical machine. Instead, you’d access them as you needed them, and they’d be served up by Nintendo. It’s a pretty common thing to do today (think of all those Google Apps you use), but for a company like Nintendo, with its online hiccups to date, I don’t think it’s plausible just yet. Unless they’ve been secretly working their tails off behind the curtain.
Bottom line is we’ll see something at E3 about this. I’m certain of it.
Cloud idea has a flaw, though: if you’re not online, you can’t play a game you previously bought. How much would it stink to not be able to play Dr Mario just because your ISP or WiFi is acting up!
There are two other options as well.
Firstly, the USB slots could allow for thumb drive support, which would make alot of sense, as thumb drives continue to increase in capacity as they decrease in cost.
Secondly, and this is more of a pipe dream: Nintendo said there is “plan to issue hardware, an external hard drive…” This surely means that they won’t be producing and selling a Nintendo-branded external hard drive, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t allow for 3rd-party hard drive support. Of course, if Nintendo would allow for hard drive support, they would most definitely want to produce one to make money off of it. That’s why this option is very unlikely.
@ David: You’re right, of course. Looks like it’s got something to do with DS Cards then, for better or worse.
Honestly the storage issue isn’t that big of a deal to me. I have a ton of VC games and I just store them on an SD card. I know the SD card storage system isn’t a lot of gamers cup of tea, however it has never bothered me.
It would be nice to be able to play games directly off of the SD card; but I just use a bit of logic:
If I’m not currently playing a downloaded game, just move it to the SD card.
Honestly, why do you need to always keep them active directly on your Wii when you may not have played them for several months?
Still, this is Nintendo of Europe, which knows SQUAT when it comes to the workings of Nintendo proper. Also, he could be just lying and a HDD is announced at E3 (remember the DS Lite?).
It’s a solid state solution being either way. I actually like that idea better and I hope it uses a even faster Flash type. Nintendo does still own their own flash tech right? That’s what the DS is using? Streaming would be bad. Flash if done right and in huge enough amounts could give the Wii better virtual ram abilities. I know what you are think it would split the market. No it would be an enhancing feature. If this drive is cheap enough you could just put games on it. The DVD drive could just be an installation disk. Yet this would be mostly for hardcore gaming. Just remember engine can be built to scale when extra hardware is available.
Be sure to play all of your games to make sure nothing has been broken in the new update including some save files.
My guess is a firmware update to allow playing off of the SD card.
Only problem, Jack is that “you’d access them as you needed them, and they’d be served up by Nintendo” is exactly what Nintendo tells you to do anyway. Steam does this too, if you happened to uninstall the game you have to re-download the title from them (granted you can make a copy and use that to reinstall… which the Wii ALREADY does too from an SD card, you just plop it back into memory.)
I’m going for option 1 with allowing direct access to the SD card which is already partially implemented in some pieces of software, so it’d be smart to at least have that as a solution and run your games off there.
What storage problem? It would seem to me that Wii has an SD card slot which can store a ton of data on a tiny little card. The only problem is lazy ass people who can do nothing but complain about every little thing that’s an inconvenience to them. Personally I bought a Wii to play Wii games. If you don’t like the setup then don’t use the feature. Damn you should be so lucky that it’s even there. It’s like those people who pay for a cell phone and then bitch when it constantly rings at their hip.
“Definitely there’s no plan to issue hardware, an external hard drive…”
The way he expounds on his “no plan to issue hardware” by being more specific makes me think that there is something *else* going on….
Wii Lite at E3?
Wii Sports, Wii Fit and an internal 8 gig SSD. $300
Let steam the date into the sky and peeping through an overview angle from God himself, and since there is no god, I am pretty much talking about Bill Gates. Hahahaha
Hopefully, one way I hope to expand the hard drive space in the Wii would be like a USB flash drive in the back. Hopefully Nintendo can make it so with downloadable content for games, a hard drive CAN be used. Something better than the 512 MB flash drive.
@TWhite, but with the cell phone you have many options on how to handle the ringing. You can send people straight to voice mail, but the phone on vibrate or silent or even answer it. Then when you answer the phone you usually have multiple ways of speaking. Into the phones mic, a headset, you can hear the other end ont the speaker phone, and even have the phone automatically answer/block/whatever if your headset is plugged in.
With the Wii when you run out of space and move it to the SD card that’s it. Unless you choose to delete it. The complaints about storage space would be gone now if we could play games from the SD card slot. Sure, people would complain about th 2 gig limit or about using multiple cards, but at least things would be much more manageable.
What happens when the Wii’s successor releases? Is Wiiware and the VC really going to go on forever? Wouldn’t you like to have everything you paid for in your control instead of making some hard choices about what to keep if the service ends, or at least ends for the Wii after a certain amount of time? My wii isn’t full yet, I actually have plenty of room now, I know that by the end of the summer I won’t, and by the end fo the year I’ll bedeleting stuff if Nintendo doesn’t come through.
I can’t believe how stupid and over-reacting gamers are with this comment. You have to admit, it has blown out of proportion. And it is only geeks that want storage. I mean my mum owns a Wii and she doesnt care about storage.
Well, I’m running out of space for my Wii. I wish they made a update so the Wii can connect to USB storage.