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Wii owners “don’t even think about going online”, the head of Worms developer Team17 has said.
Speaking to VideoGamer.com at the Brighton Develop conference, studio director Martyn Brown said that Nintendo “have got some re-educating of their marketplace with regards digital downloads”.
Team17 is currently enjoying great success with a number of self-published digital download games. It has two Worms titles in the XBLA top ten, and the number one game on the Apple App Store.
It’s also readying the hotly-anticipated digital download release of the first in a three-part Alien Breed Evolution trilogy on XBLA, PSN and PC.
In March last year publisher THQ released the Team17-developed Worms: A Space Oddity as a Wii retail game. Brown, however, confirmed that Worms is coming to WiiWare, “it just hasn’t been released yet”.
“For WiiWare, we are actually doing a title on WiiWare [Worms], we just have to see how that works. Nintendo have maybe got some re-educating of their marketplace with regards digital downloads. A lot of the hardcore are downloading stuff. I just don’t think people even think about going online with the Wii. It’s a social, family thing.
“We’ve had some sniff of numbers of what people have being doing. I think Final Fantasy stuff did really well on Wii. I would have hoped given the strength of brand and watching it everywhere else, that maybe we’ve got a chance with Worms. People know it. Obviously it’s in Nintendo’s interest to access the online side because that is the way everything is going to go. I think you’re going to see more effort from Nintendo on that side.”
The Wii’s online capabilities have drawn criticism from many hardcore gamers. The 12 digit Friend Code system forces gamers to input codes for each game in order to play online with friends.
The relatively small 512 megabytes of internal flash memory has also forced many gamers who wish to download multiple Virtual Console and WiiWare games to invest in external SD cards.
What do you think? Do you go online with your Wii? Do you download games to your Wii? Let us know in the comments section below.
