Shenanigans!!!!

Nintendo already has a ton of DLC. Just provide and let the customer decide how to store it.

Eventually Nintendo will offer better storage anyways.

Assuming an SD card wouldn't work for some techincal reason -- space not being that technical reason since you can get 16GB SD cards cheap these days -- demand would likely cause a solution to arise.

For example, say Harmonix releases some downloadable packs and they use up 400MB of the 512MB on the Wii.  People have to move their mysims save to the SD card or something (which uses some Wii storage as a cache) and become irritated andare willing to pay for a solution.  Nintendo releases a solution: a tiny, fast 8GB USB flash drive for $30 (or 4GB if they're cheap about it).  This would be fine for most people, and fine for any content provider.

So why not release the content?

Just because there is rapid growth doesn't give you an excuse to be so backwards about the development cycle of certain aspects of your system, and what it offers. Why did Nintendo have no problems addopting the Stylus for the DS, or the Wiimote for the Wii - which are 2 big cash-cows in terms of the fact that "a smaller company" would have to devote alot of resources to make the change, and be at the forefront of controller devices, but about 5 years behind on Online components, and Multiplayer?

It's not like Nintendo has proven to be incompetent - look at how many channels they have for the Wii online - Virtual Console, WiiConnect24, Internet Channel, Forecast Channel, Everybody Votes Channel, News Channel and the Check Mii Out Channel. Yet totally fail at intergrating Online Multiplayer in a majority of their titles, and provide good, quick, accurate channels for WiiWare releases (not saying what they are doing NOW is bad, but the fact that WiiWare is mostly tacked on, 3+ years behind the Xbox, and 1 and 1/2+ years behind the PS3).

So why is it, again, that Nintendo can get an online pass, and say "oh, it's because they are smaller" yet make hundreds of millions of dollars per year and can't find good, strong ways of multiplayer online intergration, and working with 3rd parties on the ultra-lucrative DLC side of the market? Nintendo could easily outsource their online needs to a very competent studio (since Nintendo has dozens of studios they work very closely with), but choose to be behind the 8-ball time, and time, and time again? From what I've seen/heard, SSBB is pretty backwards about it's online play. Why in Gods name does such a big Nintendo IP get a pass for such a failure, on a game that'll sell 5m+ copies in 3 months, when ANY other game that large, that should have multiplayer, get grilled for the smallest of issues?

Think about the big picture here. Because Nintendo isn't painting a very good one, to me. They've been backward with the SD card, and hampering Downloadable content. Try all you want, but launching WiiWare with 9 games, enough to fill up the entire stock SD card, is NOT a good business decision. Microsoft and Sony have upgraded, and tweaked, and shown that they are perfectly willing to implement new changes that make their systems better after launch. Why isn't Nintendo willing to do the same? Is it that old-style "traditional" mentality toward system making? If so, why so many great inventions from the Nintendo camp in the past few years?

And again: why is it that Nintendo has to "go slow to avoid major problems" when they are about at the same online level of capabilites of the Dreamcast, while Sony, an upstart at the online content and ability side, is vastly better?

So to me, atleast, it seems like Nintendo could fix these problems oh-so easily:

#1. Increase the initial size of the SD card included with each Wii to atleast 4gb = more revenue from DLC, VC, and WiiWare

#2. Implement 1st and 3rd party benchmarks for online components, like Microsoft has. Nintendo has a treasure trove of coolness with the Internet, Forecast, and Mii channels. Why not ask devs to use more of it in games?

#3. Hire a 3rd party company, or internally, to help Nintendo with it's online capabilities. This way, Nintendo isn't seen "lagging behind" the Big 2 for online.

As much as people want to excuse Nintendo from the DLC-Less Rock Band, I tend to NOT think that Harmonix and EA just want to magically gimp Rock Band on the Wii - which if handled right, could easily outsell the Xbox 360 and PS3 version combined. It has the market, and power to - look at GH3, and the uber-casual games. Yet if it doesn't, it lands squarely on the gimped version of Rock Band, which again, do you think would be in Harmonix's best interest to gimp? Atleast with the PS2 version, there's absolutely no hardware specs to allow for proper network intergration, and add-on content since no built-in storage system exists. But the Wii does. It's next gen. Next gen is supposed to be better in every way, but if your getting last-gen content, and "real next-gen controlls", it's not very fair to the consumer, is it?

Price of Rockband in UK: £180
Price of Wii in UK: £179
Price of Wii with HDD in UK: ~£220

Brilliant idea - people can't say "I could get a Wii for that price"! These harmonix guys are smart cookies!

That'd be 1/5th the per-GB price of a Wii SD Card...Very good deal. I think using the X360's 20gb HDD at $100 is a VERY poor comparison of value-priced HDDs for next-gen systems. The X360's HDD hasn't undergone a price change in over 2 years.

who cares about hard drives? who cares about online? I bet 95% of wii users dont care. I dont either. The other 5% are the ones bitching on sites like vgchartz.

seriously, have you ever thought about what nintendo is trying to do? Online and DLC and Hard drives and downloading stuff and bug fixes on the internet and all that shit? No thank you. Give me a console, a game, 4 controllers and 3 friends and thats all I need.

I dont want a pc on my TV. I want a console.

Don't you think there's a difference between streaming MP3s into a game and putting downloadable content onto a game from an SD card? Just because we're talking about music here does not mean it's comparable. Harmonix's song DLC for Rock Band do not equal MP3 streaming for Excite Truck. The only comparable things we have to go on is the Wii-Ware game Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Does anyone know if the DLC for that game(new houses, clothes, etc.) can be loaded straight from an SD card or must it be on the 512mb on the Wii? If it's the latter than Harmonix has a legitimate reason to not offer it and those saying it can be loaded from SD cards would be wrong. If it's the former, then I'm wrong obviously.

Also Harmonix cannot just release a firmware update for the Wii, only Nintendo can, so you know where to put blame to there.

With your numbered points, I agree completely. Except for #1, all of them are one-time (well, not really, but basically don't increase with the number of consoles) costs that could easily be made up with the increased revenue from the markets added, and #1, while it won't necessarily add to revenue, there is a good chance that combined with #2 and #3 would end up as a positive.  I would be fine if #1 were replaced by "A bit more useful SD card integration".

 With your unnumbered point, I disagree wholeheartedly.  We've already seen IN GAME (if you include japan) all the features that Harmonix says they can't do because of Nintendo.  There is blame to be had for this, and it lies solely on Harmonix putting their name on a sub-standard release of their title.  All your blame-game is doing is obscuring the FACT that we've seen all these features before, and Harmonix saying they can't be done is really only saying "We would rather make a cheap port of a game we already have than provide the best user experience we can to our customers."

 If that's how Harmonix wants to be known these days, then fine; they can be welcome to the assuredly vast numbers of Wii owners that will buy their product anyways.  I will be investing my money in companies that seem willing to put some effort into their last-gen ports (read: Capcom.  Even though RE4:Wii was a cheap cashin port, I liked it more than any other RE game because of the controls, and Okami really should have been on the Wii to begin with [control-wise]).  Even though I am getting a cheap cash-in, I give many many more props to Capcom for these ports than Harmonix does for Rock Band, as they tried to add value to my purchase whereas Harmonix seems willing to offer a sub-standard release rather than please their customers.

This goes double for not allowing the use of GH3 controllers, if those rumors are true.  That alone gets waaaay more ire from me than the DLC issue, as I could live without DLC and online play, but I refuse to buy different peripherals that do basically the same thing.

If you didn't catch it, my point was that SD cards are neither overly expensive as a device nor dramatically more expensive per Gigabyte than a proprietary hard-drive; but this really isn't the point of the overall argument ...

Harmonix claimed that they NEEDED a hard-drive in order to provide downloadable content for the Wii; being that we have already demonstrated that the Wii supports SD cards, the storage available from an inexpensive SD card is more than adequate for Rock-Band, and Harmonix can use this storage space in game, one can conclude that their excuse is not correct and that they're lying.

In other words, the lack of online support and downloadable content in Rock Band is not because of any problem with the Wii it isn't there because Harmonix didn't want to put it in their half-assed port; you/they may dislike Nintendo's options for providing online support, and you/they may dislike using SD cards for downloadable content but that doesn't mean that it is impossible to provide either using the Wii. In general EA assumed the Wii wouldn't be popular enough to support Rock Band and/or that users didn't want games like this for the Wii and when Guitar Hero 3 proved their assumptions wrong they were caught with their pants down and they decided to do a port of an undesireable version of the game; when (potential) users complained Harmonix decided to shift blame away from themselves and towards Nintendo.