Details on Nintendo's Original Downloadable Content

HaymarketRiot writes "N'Gai Croal from Newsweek has given us a broad outline of Nintendo's plans for downloadable original content. To be called 'WiiWare', the company will be selling these all-new games via the Wii's Virtual Store for Wii points. Not only are they looking to big-name developers for these titles, but small garage-style shops 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. 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 [a rating lower than AO with the ESRB].' For more, N'Gai has an interview with Reggie Fils-Aime on the subject. Unfortunately, we won't be seeing a finished product until 2008."

Comments

Re:Maybe the author has a minimum article length?

[ElleyKitten]

The XBox's strength is in implementation, not innovation. Online gaming was old-hat by the time the original XBox came out, and it wasn't even really new for consoles. What Microsoft did was make a good online gaming system for consoles. By the same token, the 360 doesn't have anything completely new and different, in the same way the wiimote is, but it implemented a lot of old ideas in good ways. When it works.

Re:Maybe the author has a minimum article length?

[cowscows]

I've always thought that the Xbox has pretty much gotten a fair deal on slashdot. Of course there's been the fanboys from either side who refuse to give an inch regardless of the realities, and still a general dislike/distrust of Microsoft. But overall, it seems that the general mindset (generalizing is bad, I know, but sometimes interesting) is that Xbox Live has been a monumental step in online console gaming, and MS did a pretty darn good job with it. MS also received a good bit of praise for their decision to include a HD standard with the Xbox, and a good amount of criticism for making it optional for the 360. The 360 appears to have less innovative stuff in it, but still has a fairly positive vibe to it around here as far as I can tell.

All that being said, MS tends to miss the mark with new products far more often than they really get it right, so skepticism isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it doesn't seem that the majority of the /. crowd has a problem acknowledging when they do something well. At worst, a lot of us wonder why they can't be more consistent at it with all the resources they have.