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."

Comments

Different Kind of WiiWare

[The MAZZTer]

We might be seeing a different kind of WiiWare popping up soon... a new version of the "Twilight Hack" (a stack smash using a specially crafted Zelda save game) now supports running code right off an SD card instead of using a GameCube SD -> memory card adapter. I just played some ... umm... Tetris... and Linux hangs when it goes to boot... but it's only been a few weeks since the hack was first published. I personally can't wait to see what kind of homebrew people come up with,

Re:Different Kind of WiiWare

[MtHuurne]

Was Linux hanging or was it waiting for you to log in via the serial connection? (USB Gecko)

I've been playing with the proof of concept Wii Linux released by isobel of gc-linux.org and although it is far from complete, a lot is working already (mainly the GameCube compatible stuff).

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.

To Wii or not to Wii

[dancingmad]

I have a Wii I left in the U.S. and now I am considering buying one in my current location.

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).

$4m?

[CSMatt]

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) It can't be that difficult to make 4 millidollars on Xbox Live.

Re:$4m?

[lexarius]

Personally, I was wondering what the conversion rates on dollar-meters were.

Apparently, it's about 8.43 euro-feet. Or around 880 yen-cubits.

Xbox Live changes affect Sony?

[feepness]

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) How do they get to capitalize on the likes of Sony from Microsoft cutting royalties to Xbox Live?

Also, with the 360's declining sales this is not a smart move from Microsoft.

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:Xbox Live changes affect Sony?

[ecavalli]

Presumably Nintendo has been capitalizing on Sony's string of huge promises that never quite come to fruition, or are pruned back drastically when they eventually see release.

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?

[morari]

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. All Nintendo really has to do is stop using game specific Friend Codes and just use the one main Wii Code that every console comes with. This would be perfectly streamlined and allow for a much more flexible identification system as it would be an assigned number with no fighting over user names. They should also probably allow voice chat between friends.

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.