I have the reputation of the resident cynic regarding Nintendo's long unmet promise to independent developers on the Wii. So, I'm trying to get excited about yesterday's WiiWare announcement. The reason I'm not there yet comes from a number of important uncertainties in the announcement and press coverage of it.

Nintendo claims they won't police content for WiiWare, which would differentiate the service significantly from Xbox Live Arcade, for example. Still, I rather agree with XBLA colleague David Edery, who muses:

I think these concerns are dead-on. What Nintendo's announcement completely skirted is the business reality of indie development on the machine. Developers will still need devkits, which cost around $2k each, admittedly relatively cheap compared to their competitors (if you don't count XNA Game Studio Express, which is free, albeit different). Developers who can afford it still have to go through the developer application process, in which Nintendo vets potential devs based on factors like previous experience, stability, and and ability to securely store the trade-secreted devkits themselves.

As I've mentioned before, Nintendo has been holding indie dev applications for well over a year (save studios they specifically invited), so the question of which indies will be deemed worthy of receiving the tools remains unanswered. Edery is very right to wonder if the channel might be vetted for content in the dev application process rather than the publishing process. Persuasive Games has had our developer application in since just after GDC '06, but we make games about politics, most of which have very obviously biased opinions. Will this affect our eligibility? Hard to say... when we've called Nintendo to check in over the past year, we've always been told the process has been delayed.

Other questions: what does Nintendo of America chief Reggie Fils-Aime mean when he says "Independent developers armed with small budgets and big ideas will be able to get their original games into the marketplace to see if we can find the next smash hit"? Is this a legitimate channel for small games, or just a talent contest for larger deals? Certainly the need to acquire an ESRB rating for each game will increase the expense and time to market for these games, making many of the smaller experimental games the web often celebrates potentially infeasible on WiiWare.

N'Gai Croal is on my list of top game journos, but I'm a little disappointed that he didn't seem to ask any of these questions when Nintendo floated him the exclusive for the release. A dozen or more excited friends and colleagues have contacted me in the past day about WiiWare, and I've had to break the news to them about the questions just raised. The potential for WiiWare is indeed huge, but for now it's largely hypothetical. We should all try not to let our inner fanboy get the best of us on this one.

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