25 March 2008

WiiWare: Anti-Consumer Out of the Gate?

With its very first big title, Nintendo has already set a bad precedent for its WiiWare service. Square Enix’s Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King costs $15 to download, but you only get one playable army. To get the rest, you’ll have to pay $1-3 for each extra feature. This was an issue with Lumines on XBOX Live a year-and-a-half ago. I believe in that case you had to buy four different products to get the entire game. Arguably you can look at it along the rationalization that you only have to pay for features you want, but most people saw it very plainly as nickel and diming. Nintendo should have seen that happen and avoided it for WiiWare, but they were probably too busy back then not manufacturing enough Wiis to care (or perhaps swimming in piles of DS money). Offering bona fide extra content for a fee is fine, but selling an under-featured game and expecting players extra for stuff that should have come in the box is not. Developers can levy whatever arguments they’d like about what content justifies coming in the original package and what should be extra, but as a consumer it’s pretty easy to apply the “I know it when I see it” test.