Now here’s something you don’t see everyday: developers defending Nintendo’s online plans and pounding on Microsoft’s. Everyone loves Xbox Live Arcade, right? Apparently not.

“Nintendo has made it very clear to us that we’ll not only be making a better royalty rate from WiiWare games, but we’ll also have a better chance of selling games – the service won’t be clogged up with the retro titles that have blighted the chances of many independent studios on Xbox Live Arcade.”
– Anonymous WiiWare development studio boss

“Frankly, we’re not looking at making games for Xbox Live Arcade because the service is full of sh*t.”
– Another WiiWare developer

Nintendo must have a pretty stinkin’ awesome arrangement going to have evoked these kinds of comments from developers.

Obviously, a large part of this love for the WiiWare program should stem from costs to developers and ease of getting their games on the online market. Here’s what Nic Watt, developer for the Australian studio Nnooo, had to say:

“We found trying to get a downloadable title approved on other platforms prohibitively expensive as we needed to supply artwork and demos to be looked at and if that demo is not signed we could have spent three to six months worth of development money and be nowhere.

“It should be noted that we can purchase almost two to four Wii development kits for one Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 one, which as you can appreciate for a small company can affect our budget a lot.”

Sounds appealing enough. Now I wish we were an independent game studio. Who wants to make a game starring Matt and me?

Develop Magazine
via OMG Nintendo