Good News for WiiWare

Nintendo Entices Small Developers With Affordable And Easy to Use WiiWare SDK's After Fallout With Microsoft.

For those unfamiliar with it, WiiWare is Nintendo's soon-to-be-released service for downloadable content (games, mostly) for the Wii. Today IGN reports that Nintendo is preying on demoralized XBLA (Xbox Live Arcade, a similar service for the Xbox from Microsoft) developers to bolster WiiWare's library. According to IGN, 

"Microsoft recently cut the royalty rate it pays developers in half, from 70 percent to 35 percent for games that earn less than $4 million. As a trade off, Microsoft is now handling some of the localization and worldwide rating work, but game makers are apparently still angry."

The IGN article explains that Nintendo's software development kits are easy to use, as well as up to four times cheaper than the ones for Microsoft's service. Read the whole thing here.

A Side:

I read that Nintendo is promoting (to developers) the fact it will not be pushing retro titles with WiiWare. Well, duh. This makes sense because WiiWare's meant to help out smaller, newer developers, –but it's misleading, isn't it? WiiWare is a companion service to the Virtual Console, which we all know is a service for nothing but retro titles. They're the same thing, just separated by this very important distinction; users spending money on WiiWare titles will not see it as too much different from downloading the old games from Virtual console, correct? So how can Nintendo say they don't have an emphasis on retro titles?