There is no doubting that the Wii has out sold by an enormous margin both Microsoft’s XBox and Sony’s Playstation. Nintendo’s focus on it’s innovative controller instead of shinier graphics allowed it to reach beyond the core gaming market and into the hands of the casual, first-time gamer.
Now they are ready to break open the market for downloaded games. The Wii Store has two channels, the Virtual Console for purchasing games of yesteryear, and WiiWare for purchasing new content. Established gamers may purchase childhood favorites from the Virtual Console but new gamers are unlikely to get excited about the original Mario Brothers, Kirby or Street Fighter. Until now the new content offerings from the WiiWare channel have been limited to updates and the Opera web browser.
On May 12 (U.S. projected date) all that is going to change. Nintendo has been hard at work lining up developers to produce downloadable games. This in itself is not a new idea; Microsoft and Sony consoles both offer downloadable games. But Nintendo’s Wii has several aspects that are attracting developers. First, by not jumping on the shiny graphics treadmill they keep development costs down. It takes thousands of man-hours to create all that high-polygon, texture-rich content required on the XBox and Playstation, content that a small studio cannot afford. Second, their Software Development Kit(SDK) is one half to one quarter the price of the other consoles. The Sony SDK is notoriously difficult to use. According to one developer, “The cost of making a game for WiiWare can be significantly less than that of an XBLA [XBox Live Arcade] or PSN [Playstation Network]game, firstly because the hardware is a lot cheaper and secondly because the SDK Nintendo provides is very detailed.”
But lower cost isn’t the only thing attracting developers to the Wii. Nintendo has adopted an open arms approach to third party games. Instead of exerting strict control they have given the responsibility of quality assurance (QA), maturity ratings and marketing to the development studios. As Nic Watt of Nnooo games put it, “We found trying to get a downloadable title approved on other platforms prohibitively expensive as we needed to supply artwork and demos to be looked at and if that demo is not signed we could have spent three to six months worth of development money and be nowhere. Nintendo’s stance has been about getting studios with good ideas and letting them decide what content to make rather than trying to dictate everything which goes on the channel.”
Simple and casual have been the watchwords for many of the Wii titles, but some studios are thinking beyond the party game. As the cost of a WiiWare game will be between $5 and $15, some have been thinking about long form games in episodic form, where both play and story can get as complex as a traditional boxed game.
In the end, it will be the consumer who decides the success or failure of the WiiWare channel, but if developer excitement is any indication, Nintendo has another genre-bending success on their hands.
Posted by Mugly 