The WiiWare service may be in its infancy compared to Xbox LIVE or any other standard, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft won’t throw punches at it. Microsoft’s Chris Satchell says the service has an identity crisis and is “confusing.”
“I’ve been a little confused by WiiWare… The more I look at it, the more I’m confused, because it sort of doesn’t really look like something for independents. At best it’s what we would call a registered developer programme. It’s really a way for you to get hold of dev kits and the normal development environment when you’re not signed to a big publisher. Which is very different than what we’re doing with XNA, which is you can just go and download the tools and we’re going to give you a distribution (platform) and the community will manage it.”
“I think probably they do want to enable independent developers. I don’t know how much they’re succeeding with that, and I don’t know if it’s going to be the seachange that I’m hoping we’ll see with XNA of really empowering the community.”
It may be early, but I think Satchell’s got a few points here with how Nintendo’s going about the whole process. Nintendo hasn’t yet learned to trust the homebrew community, and it’s showing.
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