WiiWare, the indie developer’s dream
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 8:20am by Jack
If you build it, the indie developers will come.
Nintendo’s betting on it, and today there’s some big news coming out of Redmond (or is that San Fran/NYC now?): WiiWare is officially an indie developers dream. “Small shops with big ideas” — that’s the spin from Regggie and company, and I’m pretty confident that with the Wii’s present success, we’re going to see a slew of new one-hit wonders flooding the Wii Shop Channel sometime soon.
This is not your daddy’s Nintendo anymore, kids.
On Wednesday morning, Nintendo will officially announce to the general public its plans for WiiWare, downloadable games for the wildly popular Wii videogame console. Unlike the vintage games already being offered for legacy systems (i.e. Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx 16) through the Virtual Console, these games will be built specifically for the Wii and sold via the Wii Shop Channel for Wii Points currency, much like the Xbox 360- and Playstation 3-specific games being sold on Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network.
What’s more interesting is that Nintendo isn’t only seeking WiiWare from established publishers and developers like Ubisoft and Sega. At a Nintendo developer’s conference earlier this week, the company informed attendees that it was seeking from indie developers as well. Shorter, original, more creative games from small teams with big ideas; these are the buzzwords that you’ll be hearing from Nintendo when its Wednesday announcement goes wide
This is not your dad’s Nintendo. This isn’t even my Nintendo anymore. It’s a whole new beast. Pricing is set by Nintendo, sure, but that’s it. Reggie Fils-Aime gave an exclusive scoop to Newsweek’s gaming savant N’Gai Croal yesterday, and let me tell you one thing–it’s going to be a free for all. Developers don’t get to set the price, as I said, but aside from that they get free reign.
Fils-Aime told us that while Nintendo, as the retailer, would itself determine the appropriate pricing for each game on a per-title bases, the games themselves would not be vetted by Nintendo. Instead, Nintendo would only check the games for bugs and compatibility, with developers and publishers responsible for securing an E for Everyone, E10+ for Everyone 10 or older, T for Teen or M for Mature rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board–Adults Only titles like Manhunt 2 aren’t welcome.
But there’s a catch (isn’t there always these days?). You have to wait until 2008 to see any games. Bummer.
Analysis
Is this like what already exists with the Xbox Live Arcade? Yes and no. Yes, it’s yet another download service, albeit one that’s a year late the party. But in 2008, who’s going to have the bigger audience? Will it be the Xbox 360, with its leveled off growth rate and (my opinion alert) maxed out 20 million person installed base? Or will it be the Wii, whose numbers at this point are all but unknowable. And by unknown I mean we have no idea how BIG the installed base will get. And another thing that Arcade does not have: a 40 million strong DS fan installed base. You think Pokemon Revolution is where the DS-to-Wii interactivity stops? Millions of dollars are guaranteed to the developer or team that can make a killer app that involves both the Wii and the DS (and online functionality, perhaps?).
How about a low key scavenger hunt using DS’s and Wii’s spread across a neighborhood? How about a real time Carmen San Diego? The cops woudln’t allow it, but how about a Wii/DS Assassin that uses the ad hoc nature of the DS and Wii for “kills”?
These are just off the wall ideas, but the point is I’m thinking about them. I’m thinking of new ways of gaming and having fun. Some ideas will fail, but the ones that succeed will do so in spades. And a few indie developers out there — hell, maybe it’s you — are going to make bank off of it.
[Thanks, McKee, N'Gai and Nintendo's PR firm!]
June 27th, 2007 at 8:46 am
From Nintendo’s press release: “The possibilities for WiiWare are limited only by the imaginations of developers.”
….uh, and the Wii’s internal memory. Nintendo is basically going to be forced into providing either a hard drive or direct read/write access to the SD card slot. Honestly, if they could get the SD card slot to function as expanded memory instead of just a backup storage dump, then everyone wins.
June 27th, 2007 at 8:49 am
What about storage? How big are these games going to be? If they’re the same size as the 360 ones (50Mb) the wii could only store 10 of them. Luckily enough, SD cards are pretty cheap nowadays…
June 27th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Honestly, I’ll never understand why Nintendo went the non-portable storage route of fixed memory.
SD cards are DIRT CHEAP. If it was me, I would’ve NOT included any fixed flash memory in the Wii console at all and instead just included a 1GB SD card with all Wii’s sold.
With this caveat - have each formatted SD card PEGGED to the console it was formatted with (to prevent piracy etc).
June 27th, 2007 at 10:01 am
i gotta say this put a smile on my face this morning. yeah it’ll not happen till next year but thats alright. i feel like it took xbox a year to get some good stuff out on their VC.
June 27th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Sounds like those hard drive rumors for the Wii might be true.
June 27th, 2007 at 10:35 am
I really doubt that Nintendo is going to just let whatever they’re given get put on the service. They might not be as anal about it as MS is with Live, wait what am I talking about, this is Nintendo there’s a fair chance that they’ll be as anal as they feel like just because they can.
June 27th, 2007 at 11:01 am
With this being possible at 2008, there is plenty of time for those HDD’s to be announced and shipped. If it does happen, we might see those Wii-only HDDs available around the same time the WiiWare games are coming out, or maybe sooner with the upcoming NeoGeo games. Who knows.
June 27th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
I predict the VC Neo Geo games will be pre-compressed, so that they don’t take up as much space as they did on their original 100MB+ cartridges.
June 27th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
w00t, got me some credit! Even if it my real name, heh.
I think this pretty much confirms the Hard Drive rumor, or at least gives a not-so-subtle nod of the head to some other means of storage. If they really wanted to, even, they could allow for SD cards to be a viable mean of holding information.
And everyone seems to think that the Wii has 500 MB of storage. That’s not completely true. It HAD 500 MBs…an up-to-date Wii sans VC games and save files has about 320 MB.
June 27th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
320 Megabytes… minus some save files and VC games, say, 256 Megabytes left on your average Wii for those games?
That fits about, what, three games or so?
June 27th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Ignoring the “no-memory” whiners… I’m happy to see Nintendo finally embracing indie developers and smaller games. Too bad that it won’t be till ‘08 but then again we’re already half way through the year.
I’m not worrying about space, these games are meant to be small after all and not massive titles, I’m sure if Nintendo DOES get any massive titles or promising games they’ll opt to publish the game instead of wasting virtual download space.
June 27th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Yes, probably a hard drive. You cant start doing downloads of any significance without one. Especially when they talk of a large volume in the store.
My Question: Where can I get the SDK? I assume those are available soon to developers to generate all this content…
June 27th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Honestly, Id like to see Nintendo produce new 8-bit, 16-bit, etc games for the VC. Possibly even sequels to well established franchises like Mario or Zelda.
I actually e-mailed Nintendo about it’s policy with AO rated games and I how feel that they are making the choice of what is appropriate for us to play.
They Responded with this…
Hello and thank you for contacting Nintendo,
We appreciate your sharing your comments regarding Manhunt 2. I’d like to point
out that at this time the ESRB has not provided us with an official rating for
this title.
….So if Nintendo is telling me the truth then Manhunt 2 has not been rated Adult’s Only yet.
June 27th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
It costs 2 grand, cdondanville, and Nintendo doesn’t sell them to just anyone. Maybe this announcement means they will, but still, for indie developers who have day jobs it’s still very much “your daddy’s Nintendo”.
June 28th, 2007 at 7:18 am
My internal memory is already full.
where I can save those titles?
wake up Nintendo and make the execution of VC titles from the SD possible.
forget about copying VC titles on the SD (30Kb in 15 minutes is ridicolous)
or at least all those channels will become useless in a blink of an eye
July 9th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
[...] Infendo did a little genuine journalism today and interviewed Jennifer Fellnhofer, the head of PR at Bplus. If you’ll remember, Bplus was the first developer to formally announce a WiiWare downloadable title. [...]