WiiWare Week Round Up 64
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."
To Wii or not to Wii (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing about the Wii is while games like Mario Galaxy, Smash Brothers, etc. look fun, it seems like there are fewer longer games, or gamer's games (SRPGs, for example; the only one that comes to mind is Fire Emblem) for the system.
I see WiiWare as being an excellent antidote. Someone who wants to code a SNES style SRPG or RPG that last for 40 hours has the resources to do so. Moreover, with limits on file size, the developers are going to have to take some time with gameplay to make a successful game (the forthcoming Crystal Chronicles WiiWare title seems to encapsulate this; it looks good, but there is obviously some limit to what it can do graphically - this I hope will be made up for by richer game play).
Re:Xbox Live changes affect Sony? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sony's Home, the online performance of any of their games, the vibration features in their controllers, etc have all suffered from this issue and things like this push developers -- particularly smaller developers who don't have large corporate entities forcing them to release games on certain platforms -- away from creating games on a certain console.
Nintendo has had a lot of these same issues (most notably the Wii's online gaming system) but the sheer number of people who own the system currently and those who will own the system in the future combined with the eventual reality they'll face (that they can't play strictly Nintendo games forever) creates an extremely lucrative market for any developer who wants to create something without millions of dollars or a 4 year time frame and still make good money.
The only question now is whether or not Nintendo can match (or even approach) the convenience and usability of Microsoft's XBLA system. Microsoft has done a lot of things wrong, but Xbox Live is not one of them.
Re:Xbox Live changes affect Sony? (Score:5, Insightful)
The online components of Guitar Hero III and Super Smash Bros Brawl work pretty well for what they are, with those two points being the only real improvement that absolutely needs to happen. I could care less about leaderboards and such since they junk just brings out the worst of competitive scum in games. I do hope that Nintendo opens up access to the SD card a bit more with Wii Ware however, allowing content to be played off of it. Transferring stuff back and forth to the Wii's internal memory is a pain, especially with downloadable content and such on the horizon.
Re:Xbox Live changes affect Sony? (Score:3, Insightful)