Nintendo to Announce “WiiWare”

Recently, Newsweek spoke with Reginald “Reggie” Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America present. He has revealed to them that tomorrow Nintendo will officially announce its plans for WiiWare, downloadable games for the popular Wii console. This is different from VirtualConsole in that these games would be completely built to be Wii games and not just legacy (NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, etc.) titles found in VC. These games will be available in the Shop Channel and will be sold by the means of Wii Points. This makes the new WiiWare akin to downloadable games and demos for Xbox 360’s Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network.

One of the post potent criticisms facing Nintendo and its Wii this generation is its “little to no” online support. Nintendo is finally beginning to hear the needs of fans by expanding upon online features, unlike back in the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 1 era where Nintendo stuck to the cartridge format over CDs and ended up losing sales because of that. Nintendo is expressing greater flexibility this time around. Perhaps the most interesting fact of this WiiWare is that Nintendo is seeking indie developers - small teams of game designers with shorter games with big ideas. Nintendo is said to determine the price of each individual game, while each game is responsible for getting an appropriate rating from the ESRB - AO titles are not allowed. WiiWare should be available sometime next year.