Nintendo Wooing Peeved Developers to WiiWare?
By Chris on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 2:54 PM PST In Game Companies, Game Consoles, Game Platforms, Games, Games Industry, Microsoft, Nintendo, Nintendo, Sony
WiiWare is almost ready to launch, and if Develop Magazine is correct, Nintendo might be lobbying pretty hard to get developers from Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network to come over to its new service. Royalties have been reportedly cut in cut for first-party XBLA games, which has led to some less than happy developers – which Nintendo has been quick to court for WiiWare.
Among the points Nintendo is making to developers is that the service won’t be hampered down by retro games, which PSN and certainly XBLA are guilty of being home to. Developers apparently aren’t happy that their games are surrounded with retro stuff, with one anonymous developer saying, “Nintendo has made it very clear to us that we’ll not only be making a better royalty rate from WiiWare games, but we’ll also have a better chance of selling games - the service won’t be clogged up with the retro titles that have blighted the chances of many independent studios on Xbox Live Arcade.”
While he or she was fairly polite, other developers were anything but. “Frankly, we’re not looking at making games for Xbox Live Arcade because the service is full of s***,” said another anonymous developer.
All of this and more is covered in Develop’s WiiWare Week: Versus Round article here. I think there are plenty of people who have been writing off WiiWare as a platform, but if Nintendo is able to successfully get significant support from third parties, it could turn out to be a more significant platform than Xbox Live Arcade or PSN.
Nintendo still offers retro games, they just separate them out from the WiiWare stuff unlike Xbox Live Arcade where you have everything in the same place. I have no idea what it is like on the PSN.
Well I think that’s the difference. WiiWare is its own service, completely separated from the Virtual Console which makes a difference in terms of marketing and mind share.
PSN isn’t nearly as bad as XBLA in terms of being hampered by retro games; looking at the ‘new games’ section under Games right now on the PlayStation Store, I see 8 original games and two PSone Classics.
I don’t care who does it, as long as we get a viable downloadable platform for indie developers, one that is good for consumers and those making the games. I hope wii-ware is as good as it can be and we see lots of neat and quirky titles.
I think its an interesting a valid criticism of both PSN and XBL about all the retro games clogging it up. I do think PSN has a couple of advantages though because it can accommodate games such as Warhawk and GT5 Prologue which neither XBL or WiiWare can and I’m certain that Home will give devs interesting ways to promote new titles that wont be capable on the other 2 systems. For instance the big new PSN release of the week could have a large area in the main hall where Home users could visit, learn about the game and play a demo.
How do they expect us to download lots of games with only a 512mb drive?
@ used cisco[quote]“I don’t care who does it, as long as we get a viable downloadable platform for indie developers, one that is good for consumers and those making the games. I hope wii-ware is as good as it can be and we see lots of neat and quirky titles.”
AGREED!
I agree with used cisco and 800hightech….