Wii Ware opens the door for indie developers

Remember how the Nintendo Wii shop channel has a button for Wii Ware? So far only Opera and Nintendo has used that space to post up new channels, but in “early 2008” it is going to be a home for downloadable Wii games. The concept of Wii Ware is to let smaller teams develop creative (motion controlled?) games without having to worry about selling them on store shelves.

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“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," says Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime. "WiiWare brings new levels of creativity and value to the ever-growing population of Wii owners."

 

The possibility of indie games is tantalizing, but the Wii’s limited storage space might be creative restriction. There is only 512 MB of internal memory on the Wii compared to the gigabytes of space for downloadable content on the Xbox 360 and PS3. Nintendo can’t allow a game to suck up all of the Wii’s internal memory or even half of it. One likely solution is Nintendo is going to set an upper limit on how big Wii Ware games can be. The 64MB limit didn't stop original games from coming out on the Xbox 360, but it was one of the reasons Lumines ended up getting sold in annoying pieces.


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