I've been really hard on Nintendo over the past year about their support for independent development (here, here, and here, for example). So part of me wants to eat my words a bit, since Persuasive Games just got our Wii developer approval letter late last week. At the very least, I can no longer claim that Nintendo will be using their first party licensing restrictions to perform de-facto content policing. We still have to see how the WiiWare channel really works, of course.

There's no question that I'm looking forward to having a go on the gadget to see what it can do -- maybe I'll port Guru Meditation to Wii Fit :). But a year and half has gone by since I first started thinking about what it would mean for us to develop for Wii. Since then, the supply of the consoles is still scarce, with confirmations that component problems will make the machine hard to find through the rest of the year at least. As we've started to focus more on newsgames, I wonder if it's wise to spend precious resources dabbling with a machine that seems so rare despite its promise.