OMG Nintendo

Nintendo's WiiWare service is one of many huge releases Nintendo is rolling out in the first half of 2008. The Japanese launch is set for March 25th with an assortment of games specific to that region. The American launch is set for May 12th with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as King, an undisclosed title from Telltale Games, and a totally new title called LostWinds from Frontier Developments.

WiiWare is going to deal completely new titles (if not new IP), to distinguish its offerings from the Virtual Console's retro line-up. This approach stands in sharp contrast to the approach used by XBLA and the younger PSN, which generally mix all downloadable offerings together regardless of type. This seemingly slight distinction could very well be part of a grand strategy on Nintendo's part, intending to court independent developers away from PSN and, to a greater degree, Xbox Live Arcade.

Opinions on the Xbox 360 vary, but just about everyone who knows what they're talking about loves Xbox Live Arcade, where you can download a tremendous variety of weird little pick-up-and-play titles that frequently offer full suites of online features. Everyone, that is, except the developers.

"Nintendo has made it very clear to us that we'll not only be making a better royalty rate from WiiWare games, but we'll also have a better chance of selling games - the service won't be clogged up with the retro titles that have blighted the chances of many independent studios on Xbox Live Arcade," said one studio boss, who didn't want to be named.

Another Wii Software developer added: "Frankly, we're not looking at making games for Xbox Live Arcade because the service is full of shit," pointing at its abundance of retro titles.

Recent changes to Microsoft's royalty structure also seem to disadvantage the small publisher who's looking to make it big off of developing a DLC title.

Microsoft's recently slashing the royalty rate of first-party published Xbox Live Arcade title from 70 per cent to 35 per cent (with part of the trade off being that the format-holder now handles some of the localisation and worldwide game rating duties) has angered many studios.

Since it's known that new IP can struggle on XBLA, then it's likely more adventurous developers that were looking to Microsoft as a publishing partner now feel left out in the cold.

What's noteworthy about WiiWare is that even though the service hasn't launched yet, it already has far more content in the pipeline and more enthusiastic developers talking to the media than either PSN or XBLA had at a similar point in its development cycle.

This seems to be stemming from Nintendo's famous "blue ocean" strategy of finding completely untapped demographics and creating unique software to entice them into becoming gamers. What smaller developers see is a chance to create low-risk, high-profit breakout hits. WiiWare also lets smaller developers craft games specifically around the Wii Remote controller without assuming as much financial risk as they would in the creation of a retail Wii title.

Access to the WiiWare platform is also seems unusually open, Develop describing it as "a relatively open platform to which developers can upload whatever they want as long as they handle their own QA, ESRB/PEGI ratings and marketing." Developer Nic Watt of the Australian studio Nnooo describes the situation at the other download services in far more intimidating terms:

"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," he says.

Likewise, in , Watt makes clear the massive difference between starting up a WiiWare development studio and starting development on downloadable titles for PSN or XBLA.

"It should be noted that we can purchase almost two to four Wii development kits for one Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 one, which as you can appreciate for a small company can affect our budget a lot."

If this is the case, then WiiWare is likely to play host to some extraordinarily creative and possibly bizarre titles. (There also may be a lot of junk.) The overhead is so low that studios that have previously only dared Flash and casual PC games are making the lead. Some studios are starting up purely to develop and publish WiiWare titles (such as Watt's Nnooo).

Interestingly, Nintendo is also set to let the publishers of WiiWare titles set their own prices for game downloads. Medaverse is putting up their original Gravitronix game for a mere 500 Wii Points, the same price you'd pay for an old 8-bit game on the Virtual Console. The price was chosen specifically to entice new buyers.

Western developers are jumping on the WiiWare bandwagon so quickly that European game dev mag Develop was able to spend an entire week spotlighting WiiWare projects by European dev houses.

All the quotes and info from this piece were derived from Develop's massive coverage, so head there if you want more details. If you want more coverage of WiiWare, then keep an eye out for future posts on the subject right here.