The State of WiiWare, Xbox Alternatives

CVG is running a piece discussing the current state of WiiWare, and where they expect it to go in the future. They point to the success of Mega Man 9 on WiiWare and other platforms, but worry that the perception will arise that certain games are "too good" to be featured on WiiWare. GameSetWatch has a related interview with independent developer Ninjabee discussing their recent games and comparing WiiWare with Xbox Live Arcade. Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced that the new Xbox Experience coming in November will included their Community Games initiative, which will allow amateur game developers to create and share games using the XNA development tools.

Comments

Re:Don't forget Sony

[DrEldarion]

You mean like Pain, Calling All Cars, Flow, Warhawk, Echochrome, Everyday Shooter, the Pixeljunk games, Super Stardust HD, etc. etc. etc.?

Re:The DRM issue needs to be sorted out.

[Ringl]

You don't even need to set up the my nintendo account. Anything you purchase you can delete off your system as much as you want and just go back and download it right away.

And if your system dies? When you get a new one call Nintendo's customer support, give them your old serial number and then give them your new serial number and Nintendo transfers everything you've purchased to your new console. Then everything you've purchased is available to download.

Nintendo doesn't have any DRM issue that can't also be said of the 360 or PS3.

Re:The Real Problem...

[Karma Sink]

SD cards aren't very expensive. I only have a 2GB card in my Wii and there's still plenty of room for me to download games. Mind you, I tend toward NES and SNES games more often for download, but it's still a lot of space.

Re:Amateurs are the key

[CronoCloud]

You're forgetting the PS3 has the ability to run Linux, so there's your hobbyist dev station right there, at least for 2D games.

Re:You still get your WiiWare/VC games after repai

[xenocide2]

A savegame is one of the paths to breaking the data / code barrier and running untrusted code. This has two implications: piracy and viruses. We've already seen how easy it was to run untrusted code via a simple savegame. Transfer the save from the Wii to the SD card, load up the save in a hex editor and start looking for meaning. Name strings, for example. If you rewrite the save to use an overly long name, maybe it notices and nothing happens. But maybe they forgot to check the horse's name. All you need is one weak path, and now you can run homebrew emulators that compete with Virtual Console games (you can also run Linux, but there's little point without wifi). You might also be able to

There's another problem however, that affects more than Nintendo's bottom line. Malicious virii. If there was a problem with game names, it could potentially wreck a chain of players. I imagine a game like Brawl does peer to peer multiplayer to reduce latency and bottlenecks, so you can't filter out bad packets. And you can't shut down online play without fiasco. So encrypting the save at least obscures where data that might be transferred over the net is stored.