Dear Reader:
No demos planned for WiiWare titles, plus info on WiiWare title, LostWinds
Our friend N’Gai Croal loves to help us out…he’s a good guy! This morning, he gives us a heads up on two of his latest articles. First up, discussion of the WiiWare channel, and why there will not be any demos.
(On whether or not there will be downloadable WiiWare demos) The intention is that the creators will create the game and we’ll make it available on WiiWare after it passes certification. But we really don’t want to impose kind of too many restrictions on developers, or too many requirements. As an example, in many cases we don’t want to say just because people can connect to the Internet that they have to make a multiplayer via the Internet version, or Wii Connect 24 modes, or take advantage of all the types of features that are available. The key for us is not to impose too many restrictions on the content creators and allow them to create the content that and the features that they think are more suitable to express their vision of the product. And creating demos or having demos as a requirement is a very costly type of endeavor, so it’s not a requirement from Nintendo. - Nintendo of America director of project development Tom Prata
“We do not intend to have a ‘try-before-you-buy’ model that requires developers to create expensive demos. Nintendo plans to provide information on games similar to what Nintendo in Japan is doing with the Everybody’s Nintendo Channel where creators can share information on their game directly to Wii consumers.” - Golin Harris statement
The second link is a massive discussion with Frontier Developments’ David Braben, which is developing LostWinds for WiiWare. His hopes are to launch the title right alongside the WiiWare service. In the interview, we also find out that WiiWare game pricing will be close to what we see on the VC…meaning different prices for different games. I’ve posted a portion of the interview below, but make sure to click over for the entire piece.
N’Gai: David, what is your WiiWare project?
David Braben, Frontier Developments: It’s a game called LostWinds and it’s about the idea of a wind spirit that has been hidden away by a nasty guy called Balasar. But essentially looking at it as a game, it really allows us to do new things on the Wii. We now have Wii in the marketplace for a year and as a developer it takes a while to come to grips with a new system like the Wii; the wonderful combination of the remote and the nunchuck. It’s an opportunity for us to do great things with the game.
