At a private developers conference this week, Nintendo announced the introduction of WiiWare, a game-creation service that will allow developers large and small to create new downloadable video game content for sale by Nintendo through the Wii Shop Channel. WiiWare paves the way for smaller, more creative games to make their way to the public at lower prices, without any inventory risk to developers. The first WiiWare content will launch in early 2008.
This is really exciting for those great small Indie game developers, because Nintendo has begun the search for the next ingeniously ground-breaking game. Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said: “Independent developers armed with small budgets and big ideas will be able to get their original games into the marketplace to see if we can find the next smash hit. WiiWare brings new levels of creativity and value to the ever-growing population of Wii owners.”
The possibilities for WiiWare are limited only by the imaginations of developers. WiiWare provides game creators a simple method by which they can get their games to the public. This approach, combined with the remarkable motion controls of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, will give birth to fresh takes on established genres, as well as original ideas that currently exist only in developers’ minds. The reduced barriers to development provide developers the freedom to create and an inexpensive, clearly defined path to reach consumers who will ultimately determine which game will become the Next Big Thing.
WiiWare will be posted on the Wii Shop Channel. As with current Wii Shop Channel offerings, users will redeem Wii Points to download content. It will support a variety of pricing options. Details about that and upcoming projects will be announced at a later date (read: E3 on July 11-13).
There’s no way around it now, Nintendo has to announce an external hard drive for the Wii, those 512MB of internal Flash memory just won’t do or will soon already be filled up with classic Virtual Console games. My guess would be they will release an external hard drive in the shape of the standard the Wii vertically stands on. So Wii will still look the same.