Telltale Games credits Nintendo's improved SD-card support for recent spike in downloadable adventure-game sales.
At last month's Game Developers Conference, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata laid out the company's long-awaited "storage solution" for the hard-drive-less Wii. The Wii System Menu 4.0 update not only upped the maximum capacity of SD cards that the system can read, but also let users run games directly from the SD card.
What might be written off as a small technical change has made a big difference to at least one Wii developer. Today, Telltale Games CEO Dan Connors called the update "a major step forward for episodic gaming." Connors noted that storage space is crucial for episodic series such as the company's Wii franchise, Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. To prove the point, Telltale revealed that the daily sales of Strong Bad have more than doubled since the Wii update went live on March 25.
The first season of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People is currently available in five different episodes on WiiWare. Each episode costs 1,000 Wii points ($10).
Brendan Sinclair has been a games journalist since 1999. His tastes are eclectic, though he has a definite affinity for games with arcade roots. He's Canadian, but has also been at home in Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Suprsolder, what things do you have on your Wii memory to clog it up so much? And 287 blocks to run it from your Wii memory? You do know you can delete the channel all by itself from the Wii,right? All you need is the saved file (which most of the time takes 1 block). It does run from the SD card. I don't think you understand this solution that well.
I got World of Goo the day I downloaded the update. It was on my wishlist... a nice present for myself :) What a game!
Hi. They're not run directly off the SD card, Brendan. They're copied from the SD to the system storage every time you "launch" them from the SD menu; then deleted afterward. This extra copying and deleting from the system storage could potentially shorten the lifespan of it, and the Wii it is a part of.
It's just too bad they didn't do this long ago. I'm still glad they did though. I know I downloaded more games since they released the update. I hadn't downloaded much of anything since I was out of memory and I had already deleted stuff I didn't want to delete.
Why can't it run from the card without having to use the Wii's internal memory what so ever? None, there is no excuse, not even 1. thetravman, I download Sin and Punishment onto my SD card but I only have 115 block left on the Wii's internal memory, and Sin and Punishment needs 287 to run. So I have to delete stuff still to run the game. It's crazy and it's bullcrap. Nintendo could have made them run directly of the card without the need for the Wii's memory at all. But they won't because Nintendo doesn't care and don't give me the piracy excuse because that is what it is. They can run encrypted code of the SD card and still lock it to that Wii, it is possible, but again they won't.
Wow, Nintendo actually made a meaningful change with an update, beyond anti-piracy! Astounding!
Suprsolider, what the heck are you talking about? You complaining about the 1-5 block save files you have to keep on your wii memory to play the game? I've managed to download 25 of my vc games onto my SD, and I actually got over a 1000 blocks back on Wii. Seems like a solution to me.
I am not having any lag issues (yet) playing games from the card but I did wait until they provided a better storage solution before purchasing. Call it a sit in protest. I immediately started buying upon installing a new SD II 16 gb card.
Yeah, you've got to have chunk of memory open on the Wii's internal memory to run stuff off SD. That's still a hell of a lot better than having to copy something over to SD, delete it off the Wii, then move what you wanted back over from the SD. On some of the bigger WiiWare games I've got, it was 10-15 minutes of jerking around with that before I could play. And I can now save directly to the SD from the Wii Shop channel, which keeps me from having to clear up space before I can even download something. Yeah, this solution isn't perfect, but it's light years beyond what Nintendo was offering, and I've got no problem with keeping a big chunk of the Wii's internal memory open memory for it to work. In fact, I probably won't ever save anything to the internal memory again.
Oh, you mean the joke of a storage solution. You still can't run it off the SD card itself, instead you have to have the sufficent memory available on the Wii itself before it will launch the game, so really your not winning at all.
I haven't been on the Wii shop channel much since the update has been released, just because I haven't had the time. But there's been a LOT of games on WiiWare and a few N64 games that I've thought about buying, looked at my total space left on my console and ultimately said "F it, I don't feel like moving stuff off to my SD card right now" and just exited the Wii Shop Channel without buying anything. And it's nice that I can play the stuff I've already offloaded to SD without having to shuffle it back to the main memory. This is one of the best updates I've seen for any console. Next time I see a good price on a 32GB SD card, I'll definitely buy one, pop it in my Wii, and know I'll never have to worry about space again.
Heh heh, Strong Bad's games takes up 300 blocks, but are some of the best WiiWare can offer. It's got me going to homestarrunner.com every once in a while... Season 2 perhaps...?
I downloaded a few games I was holding off on the very day that update happened. Not Strongbad though.
I wouldn't have expected the update to have that much of an impact on sales of WiiWare titles. That's pretty impressive. I hope it means we'll start to see bigger efforts on WiiWare development.
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