WiiWare Week Round Up

Mark Graham writes "All this week, UK games development site Develop has been running a series of articles under its 'WiiWare Week' banner, analyzing developer's affections for, and the potential success of Nintendo's upcoming WiiWare digital distribution platform. Most revealing is the claim that Nintendo has been secretly 'waging war' on the likes of Sony and Microsoft by capitalizing on frustrations over cuts to the Xbox Live Arcade royalty rate (down from 70% to 35% for any game making under $4m in revenue) and talking up the service's access to a wide audience to win over development support. It features commentary from both established developers (such as David Braben, creator of Elite, and Scott Orr, creator of Madden) — and indie teams (developers of new WiiWare games Pop and Gravitronix) making launch games for the service."

Re:MultiWii.

[Anonymous Coward]

They have to pay a license-fee if the Wii plays DVDs or CDs (~$25 IIRC).

Re:Xbox Live changes affect Sony?

[imasu]

I agree with your question, though one has to be careful before attacking the 360 in the console space right now. Look at the top ten games on Gamespot right now and then criticize Microsoft's 360 strategies. As of today, it's 4 360, 3 PC, one Wii, and two PSP games.

Console game sales charts are even more 360-biased. It's utterly dominating game sales, which is of course where the real money is. And even the crappy XBL games get like 100k downloads.

Microsoft, in spite of themselves, are doing pretty damn well with their 360 strategy.

Re:Different Kind of WiiWare

[MtHuurne]

The most useful sites are wiibrew.org for the technical info and gc-linux.org for the Linux stuff. You can get a cross compilation toolchain for PPC at devkitpro.org, but it does not include a libc, so it doesn't get you very far in Linux. There are several kits to easily build your own toolchain and minimal system, I'm playing with buildroot (from uClibc) and after tweaking the config and patching the Makefiles a bit I'm getting results.

Re:Xbox Live changes affect Sony?

[Guppy06]

You do so by continuing to read the rest of the sentence: "and talking up the service's access to a wide audience" The Wii has something the industry refers to as 'an installed base.'

Re:Xbox Live changes affect Sony?

[feepness]

Umm, corrected link, duh.

Market share for 360 is lowest amongst consoles, even in US. [gamasutra.com]