disclaimer: this has nothing to do with music.

i’m a big video game fan and a big nintendo fan in particular. the wii’s small amount of onboard memory has been an idle worry of mine since i picked up the system but with yesterday’s launch of wiiware, and the larger sized downloadable games it brings, it’s become an immediate problem for me. although there has been some recent progress with iwata at least acknowledging the limitation exists, it has long been apparent that it is not a pressing concern for the company. but it needs to be, and the more they hear about it the better. if your running out of space on your console, i’d encourage you to shoot nintendo a note to let them know about it. if you’re interested in such things, you can check out the rambling letter i sent to nintendo earlier today after the break.

Hi. I’m really glad to see the launch of wiiware and the quality of the games being offered thus far. What I’m not so happy about is having to choose which game I should download, or wondering if I should hold off to see what games will be released in the upcoming weeks that I might want to play more. I have to do this because I only have the memory for one (maybe two) wiiware game on my console.

I don’t think I’ve done anything unusual to reach this point. I’ve downloaded on average one VC game per month, the majority being from the SNES and NES. I do have all the channels that you have released, but I enjoy these and do not look forward to having to give them up for new software. I can and will likely transfer the save data from all games that I’m not currently playing regularly to an SD card, but as most of these files are small I don’t anticipate it making much of a difference.

Had you said that the wii’s memory limitations were a problem limited to nintendo’s most avid fans in early 2007, I likely would have agreed with you. But now, a year and a half into the system’s life, I have to believe that a large percentage of wii owners must be dealing with these issues. With the launch of wiiware that percentage will only continue to grow and your users will become more and more frustrated.

I want to buy FFCC: My Life as a King and Lost Winds very badly. I will want to buy Dr. Mario when it is released in the near future, along with several other games which have been announced for release later this year. With the convenience and low price point of wiiware titles, I would certainly be willing to give many new games a try… if I had the space. But as it currently stands, I will only be able to buy one of the many wiiware titles I would like to buy. Not to mention any upcoming VC games I may be interested in.

So what’s the solution? It would have been so incredibly shortsighted of Nintendo to launch the wiiware service and its dozens of announced games without any means to store more than a few of them that I know you must have something planned to increase the wii’s memory capacity in the future. But where is it? I’m not deleting my VC games and I’m not deleting the channels either. I don’t care if I can redownload them for free or move them to an SD card. I don’t want to do it. So how long will I be limited to my one wiiware download?

I’ve got several SD cards sitting around my house, a thumb drive, an external hardrive… allow me to load data from any of these sources and the problem is fixed. Want to make more money? I’ll gladly buy a Nintendo produced external hard drive. Just give it to me already. You’ve got to fix the problem and you’ve got to do it soon. Your devoted fan base is only able to buy a fraction of the software they would otherwise buy without hardware limitations and even your most casual fans are bound to encounter problems once they try to download more than a few wiiware titles. You must realize that the success of wiiware is closely tied to the wii’s memory limitations. How long until you decide to fix the problem?

Thanks,

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