100 Games in Development for WiiWare
By Stephany on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 10:57 AM PST In Gamer Life, Games Industry, Nintendo, Nintendo
After announcing some of the future titles for download via the Wii and a shifting focus on WiiWare, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has stated that over 100 games are in development for WiiWare. Nintendo’s answer to independent and smaller games development, WiiWare will be making a huge splash come 2008 if indeed there are over 100 titles in development.
However, those of you who develop games at home in your own evil laboratory will not be able to play with Nintendo. Currently, Nintendo is only working with developers who are or were a known publisher or have “a name.” With that said, Nintendo is keeping strict control over development kits and decide who does and does not get a kit .
The WiiWare service seems to be popular with devs because this way, gamers will not have to drive or hitch a ride to a retail outlet to get the game of their choice. According to company president Satoru Iwata, “We’ve already received proposals for over 100 titles from software development companies. We’ve made a platform for developing software at low cost, and would like to offer a new business chance based around a battle of ideas.”
The WiiWare service offers users new downloadable games designed specifically for the home format, and can be purchased via the Wii Shop.
Via: GamesIndustry.biz
The article mentions it later, they got 100 “proposals”. I’m not sure this means there are actually 100 projects in development at this time. I suppose there were some issues with the translation. I’d love it if this were confirmed. Bring on the HDD support for Wii.
Yeah, used cisco’s final point is the only thing bad; Ninty should give you a free HDD if you download so many. That would be swell.
No, seriously, are we going to get a HDD to go with it?
Isn’t the whole point of Wii Ware to keep it cheap, cheerful and under 100MB? If that’s the case, HDDs would be overkill, or they’d be sending out crappy ones that hold less than a couple of SD cards, which are what the games are supposed to be saved to, IIRC. If you’ve got a 1GB SD card and the games are 100MB or less, you have ten games or more on that one card, and SD cards are getting pretty damn big.
It could also be like the Virtual Console, where you can delete games and re-download them for free at will.