Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection Pay & Play will be Nintendo's version of micro-transactions. Also, find out what Nintendo is doing to address Wii's storage space problem. (Hint: Nothing).
Nintendo announced today that it will soon add WiiWare games and pay-to-play content to Wii's Wi-Fi connection service.
The Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection Pay & Play service will allow users to spend Wii Points to purchase content or services for Wii games, extending the capability and longevity of those games. Games that support the paid version of Nintendo WFC will sport a bright, red-orange logo that looks similar to the current Nintendo WFC logo with the addition of a boxed outline that says "Pay & Play." Transactions will take place directly within the Pay & Play game, rather than within the Wii Shop Channel. It remains unclear whether players will also be able to purchase Wii Points from within a game.
Nintendo hardware development lead Takashi Aoyama, who made the announcement during his Game Developers Conference session, did not give specifics as to when Wii games would start to incorporate this service or what Nintendo's plans were to use the service for its own games.
Aoyama discussed the upcoming launch of WiiWare, or more accurately, the first WiiWare games. He showed a video of LostWinds, a launch title from Frontier Developments. The video showed a character being controlled with the analog stick on the Nunchuck and the Wii Remote pointer drawing "gusts" of wind on the screen to do things like make the character jump higher, get blown around in zig-zag and looping patterns, trap enemies, and fling baddies off the screen.
With the promises of downloadable content and WiiWare games, the limited storage space of the Wii became a big question. Aoyama addressed this problem by presenting three ways in which Nintendo is getting around this. First, Nintendo is offering support for system-level expansion of compressed programs when they are launched from the Wii Menu. Second, users can transfer content from the Wii system memory to SD cards via the storage slot. Third, users can delete content from their system and download that content again later for free.
In other words, Nintendo is doing nothing to address the lack of storage space except to try and cram as much as possible into a small space. There was no mention of a hard drive or any indication that Nintendo would be offering useful storage expansion (or better use of SD cards) any time soon, much to the disappointment of heavy-duty Virtual Console consumers.
