I read in an interview with Reggie that they were going to have a new program called Wiiware. Wiiware is going to open up development for the indie devs out there and their games would be sold in the Wii shop.  Pretty cool I think. Only thing is I will need to get a lot more Wii points cards. But what does everyone else think? Good? Bad? Indifferent?

Also the Xbox 360 has something similar and it has so far failed horribly. Does Wiiware share the same fate?

What is this WiiWare you speak of?

...

What date is it?

To answer your question, I hope it fails for I believe it has the potential to hurt proper software sales, I think the whole concept is cool and all but is something that should be introduced once the user base is extremly high, 50 million + kind of high.

Xbox Live is a success, not a horrible failure.

However, there are three problems that XBL doesn't have:

1. Developers will not take WiiWare seriously as a source of revenue.
2. The console's primary market of casual gamers rarely takes advantage of online features of consoles.
3. The small amount of memory on the Wii makes it inconvenient to buy and play games without using additional cards or redownloading games. The size constraints will limit the quality of avalible games.

As I am pro-Nintendo and anti-Microsoft in general, this is an objective summary of my worries with the service.

WiiWare will be a new channel (or part of the Shop channel) where you can buy/download new/original games of which will be no bigger than 40-50mb I think.

I want this to work. Hopefully games that are released will be designed from the ground up for Wii I do not want WiiWare to turn into just another means for developers to sell any suitable sized games.

Hopefully you will be able to save the games to an SD card as well, though I'm not sure if that is going to happen.

Need to here some more official announcmanets regarding this.

Fingers crossed!!

 1) Square-Enix is already taking WiiWare seriously with their exclusive FF:CC game. Nintendo themselves are taking it seriously by releasing newexclusive games for it. It's only a matter of time before other developers follow suit.

2) The top-selling games on XBL, by far, are casual titles.

3) There's nothing preventing Nintendo from releasing memory expansions, or allowing games to be played off of SD cards. On top of that, WiiWare titles have a 40mb limit, which isn't too much less than XBL's old limit of 50mb. Plenty of quality games were released under that limit. You'd be surprised what you can do with so little space to work with. (Example: Wasn't Super Mario 64 released on only an 8mb cartridge?)

so far im only looking forwarf ff:cc in wii ware

I take it someone brought an old thread back from the dead? Or has everyone been living under a rock? What gives?

Yeah, Wiiware is going to be great... but I wonder how much each game is going to cost....and I really hope Nintendo lets us play games off of SD Cards

It is going to do very well. Uno was the best selling game on XBLA for a while, and before that it was Geometry Wars. It's a casual-centric service, and Nintendo's trying to have it both ways. They've already announced some puzzlers and schmups, and a 4 player online co-op Dr. Mario, and an exclusive Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. They have nothing to worry about.

And most Wii owners probably won't even use it, but hey, most 360 owners don't know about Live, and most PS3 owners don't even know why Blu-Ray is. The casuals took over, many years ago.

@ Game_Boy I was talking about this not Xbox Live Arcade.