Reggie Spills (Some) Beans on WiiWare
June 27th, 2007Over at Level Up, N’gai Croal’s indispensable blog, they have a short interview/feature with Reggie Fils-Aime mostly on WiiWare, the upcoming original downloadable games for the Wii.
According to Reggie, the content will be basically unfiltered by Nintendo, aside from bug-testing. Of course, this prompted questions about Manhunt 2 and it’s AO rating preventing it from gracing Nintendo’s console, to which Reggie mostly avoided the question and simply re-stated that AO games would not be allowed on Nintendo’s platform (or any other platform for that matter).
Still, with Reggie confirming that the first of these games would be making it out around the beginning of 2008, this is at least some positive news for some smaller, non-VC games to become available for the Wii. Reggie seems to make a big deal about the fact that there are “no requirements” for what the developer has to support in terms of controller functionality, although I’m not sure this isn’t just hyping up what should be obvious.
It’s also not clear to me how much different Nintendo’s role in these games will be versus Microsoft or Sony for their respective platforms. It sounds as if anyone can basically buy the dev kit and just start building their game, but I think the same is basically true for MS and possibly Sony as well.
Also a little on the scary side is that Nintendo would ultimately be responsible for pricing (with “consultation” with the developer) and that there would be no upper limit on the prices (and, while not mentioned, possibly download size?) It’s probably unlikely, but why do I get the feeling that Nintendo may try to price some of these games like GBA/DS games in the $20-$35 range? Given the competition’s pricing, I hope that’s not the case.
Posted in Jeff, Nintendo, Online, Wii |
June 27th, 2007 at 10:29 am
Hmm… if I were a developer, I don’t think I’d be too comfortable developing a product but not having final say on the price. How can you justify creating something if you’re not sure you can sell it at a profit beforehand?
June 27th, 2007 at 10:33 am
They do have a “final say” in the price, they just don’t have THE final say. But that is definitely an argument worth noting.
June 27th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Then surely it’s not a “final say” by definition.