Hard terms of WiiWare

Entertainment news and updates blog article

14th May 2009

Gamasutra has recently shed light on how the distribution service of WiiWare from Nintendo really works. They say that the company has set a minimum bar for sales of downloadable software. If the project does not sell a set number of copies, the developers do not receive a penny! Required number of copies sold is different for each region. Gamasutra suggests that both in the United States and Europe it ranges in the area of about 1000 copies.
There is no surprise, that many shareware developers are thinking over to quit using the WiiWare service. Well, of course, Wii offers a huge database, and, moreover, it is not that hard to develop projects for this system. However, such a system does not guarantee them any profit at all. Besides, if things go not very well, the developers will have to solve another task, namely, porting the product under other platform.
As you can see, developers are to make really a hard choice.