QFT

This is as stated in the article, a deterrent to developers pushing a ton of crap onto the service.  We are talking about ~5,000 units they have to sell in order to break past this threshold...for a download service fed to some 25 million people (iir the numbers right) being required to get 5,000 sales is not a high hurdle and should not frighten or scare away any legitimate offering.  If you can't make your game appealing enough to 2% of 1% of the available market then you honestly should not be making games.  More importantly you agreed under contract to the stipulation so you legally don't deserve to get paid either.

Not to mention that at a typical price of $10, that 5,000 threshold is only $50,000 (of which the devs would only get roughly 2/3 anyway), and if that's all you need to break even then you clearly didn't put enough effort into your game.

Nintendo's just making sure they don't lose money on a flood of shovelware by paying off their own costs first. They are basically acting as the publisher in this case and that's a very normal business model in that case.

That kinda sucks is your product doesn't sell 5,000. Shouldn't be a big deal for most, but there are retail Wii games that haven't sold that much in Japan......

I'm pretty sure this doesn't apply to retail software, just WW.

I know its only for WW. I was saying that it wouldn't be a first for a game on Wii to not break 5k. (on any platform really)

It really shouldn't be a big deal for most developers though.

What are the games that haven't sold 5k on a worldwide basis?

More importantly, every WiiWare title has several advantages that most retail games lack. When your WiiWare game gets published, you automatically get:

-Free publicity via Nintendo for millions of readers (and you're often the only WiiWare game that week, at least in N.A.)

-Front page Wii Shop placement on every single Wii for at least that week (millions of eyeballs)

-Prominent placement in the "What's New" section, often for two or three weeks

-First or second page video on the Nintendo Channel, and often the video sticks around a later page for quite a while afterwards

That's a crapton of publicity that you're buying for the amount of revenue you'd get from 2,000-6,000 sales, much more than most indie developers would ever get. If you can't manage 2k-6k lifetime sales after all that, I'd wager that your game, rather than Nintendo, is probably the problem.

Well I for one am all for quality control, one way or the other. Anything to keep WiiWare from becoming anything even remotely like Apple's Apps store! :O

That's an ocean of sh*t.

He's referring to 5k in Japan alone, and it's true: last I'd heard from Media Create, Sky Crawlers (for one) hadn't met that hurdle yet. I'm sure there are plenty of others too.

That said, I'm not sure this goal is region-specific. Moreover, see the points in my last post for the advantage a WiiWare developer has over retail games.

I'm sure there are some WiiWare games that didn't meet that minimum, but I'm confident that any game that didn't really didn't deserve to.

So Nintendo kind of scores around $70,000 for free off the backs of Wiiware devs.

Ouch.