On Wii Storage, Nintendo Moves From Injury to Insult

Blog Zorium 24 Jan , 2024 0

It’s bad enough that Nintendo refuses to address the Wii console’s tiny amount of on-board storage for WiiWare downloads, but does it have to add insult to injury by smearing the people who buy the most of its products?

Reporting from a WiiWare launch event in the U.K., Edge magazine quotes Nintendo of Europe marketing director Laurent Fischer as saying that only “geeks and otaku” want the company to introduce some kind of upgrade to the Wii’s 512 MB of game storage. Edge applies some restraint and says that Fischer is “oversimplifying.” I wasn’t at the event, but I imagine him saying this with his foot shoved far, far back in his mouth.

Take for a moment the suggestion that this is only a problem for total nerds, which I do not believe is true. But even if it were, the people who are having to jump through hoops right now deleting and reshuffling their Wii memory space every time they want to buy a new game are, by definition, buying a great deal of games.

I can understand Nintendo not wanting to deal with the desires of hardcore gamers who don’t buy their games anyway. But these are the people who, in comparison to their peers, have been absolutely pouring cash into Virtual Console and WiiWare since day one. Do they not deserve to be at least taken seriously? As both a geek and an otaku, I don’t have any room for Toki Tori (above).

But as I said, I don’t even agree with this assessment. WiiWare games are large, and most of the really good ones top out the 40 MB upper bound. A few of those, the similarly-sized Nintendo Channel, and a few game saves, and you’re almost hitting the wall. Woe betide you if you are playing games like Smash Bros. or Mario Kart, which have very large save-game files that Nintendo does not let you copy to an SD card, which means that unless you feel like deleting all of your hard work, that’s a big chunk of your Wii’s memory gone.

If Nintendo truly believes that downloadable games are an important part of the industry’s future — which it should! — it needs to provide some kind of remedy for this absurd issue. Let’s remember that it’s not just their issue, as Microsoft and Sony each began this generation with hard drives as low as 20 GB, and quickly moved to fix it when they realized that it just wasn’t going to be enough for the long haul.
Nintendo’s Mixed WiiWare Messages [Edge]

Image: Nintendo