SPECIAL REPORT: The Future of WiiWare and DSiWare

Are WiiWare and DSiWare a new bastion for the casual market, or a chance for Nintendo to win back the hearts of the traditional market it once courted so effortlessly? Speaking to Nintendo’s European head Laurent Ficher, it is evident that the platform holder is clearly hoping to appeal to every kind of gamer in its massively varied user-base.

“The key challenge for Nintendo at the end of the day is to make sure everybody possible has both a good opportunity and a good reason to go to WiiWare or DSiWare,” Ficher told CasualGaming.biz. “Basically, our customers have so many different profiles and tastes.

“Even with Virtual Console we have both older retro gamers and newcomers who are looking into the history of modern games like the more recent Mario or Zelda releases. We try to offer a selection that provides an information flow and experience gathering between all our very different gamers.

Coming directly from Nintendo’s upper echelons, while admirable, those sentiments would be easy to understand as little more than company hyperbole. With the duo of ‘Ware services only just finding their feet while XBLA and iPhone’s App Store thunder off into the future, it would take a bold studio to commit to Nintendo’s swipe at everyone who games, and everyone who doesn’t.

And bold developers there are. Gaijin Games is one such game maker, which has already met with critical and commercial success on WiiWare. The studio is behind the Bit.Trip series of games, which undoubtedly offers casual games; each iteration is simple, accessible and inviting. However, like its forerunners, currently unreleased title Bit.Trip.Void gets incredibly tough. So who is Gaijin Games hoping to reach through WiiWare?

“In terms of reach, WiiWare gets to an amazingly broad and disparate audience,” enthused Gaijin’s CEO and co-founder Alex Neuse. “That’s superb for a ‘casual hardcore’ game like Bit.Trip.Void. Casual gamers don’t need to be pandered to. They can face a challenge, and WiiWare is great for that. It also offers us a chance to reach those gamers who complain that there’s a lack of gamers’ games on the Wii.”

The market that Neuse is talking about sounds like the traditional Nintendo audience that the giant Japanese company is often reported to be loosing sight of. If Neuse is correct in his assumption, then WiiWare and DSiWare may just bring back the Nintendo fan that has long adored releases that combine apparent simplicity with subtle depth.

Speaking to Wesley Pincombe, a game designer at Ubisoft’s Quebec City Studio, which is currently preparing the release of Combat of Giants: Dragons, it’s apparent that the perceived variation in the audience of WiiWare and DSiWare also offers another perk for developers of casual games. The latest Combat of Giants is comparable with Spore, Spectrobes and Monster Hunter, and is paying a visit to DSiWare with a very specific intention.

“Reaching a varied audience is the goal of this version,” revealed Pincombe. “Being able to take a DS and DSi series onto DSiWare lets us broaden our audience more. We hope we can tempt the audience that hasn’t committed to buying the full game. Maybe it will inspire them to invest in a physical copy.”

Bringing another perspective to the table is Nicalis’ Tyrone Rodriguez, who points to the audience the casual market has attracted in the most substantial numbers recently; non-gamers. His company’s game, Night Sky (pictured), which is described most simply as something halfway between Trials HD and LocoRoco, blurs the definitions of casual and hardcore.

“In contrast with our other project, Cave Story, Night Sky is a game with a far broader appeal,” claims Rodriguez. “It’s been designed to be inviting, and to welcome newcomers to hardcore gaming. WiiWare can do that. It can reach that new Nintendo market that doesn’t play games, and that’s something for a developer to consider. And then there’s that traditional Nintendo fan, who is really hungry right now for more games on the Wii that suit their tastes.

Speaking to the ‘Ware developers, it really does seem the Nintendo download platforms might offer the casual industry an exciting new frontier, where casual and hardcore cross over more fluidly than ever before. If that’s the case, and Nintendo can make a success of the service by hosting enough quality content, XBLA and iPhone might soon have a worthy rival; something good for creativity, business and gaming in general.

The final word goes to student developer Hersh Choksi, who, thanks to the support of Konami, is now publishing a game on DSiWare initially conceived as a school project. Choksi’s experience apes the stories of bedroom coders finding their feat on the iPhone, but in the case of his game, Reflections, he is soon to launch a title on a console far less crowded than the Apple device. And it appears DSiWare is the only place Reflections could have ever seen it through from idea to final product.

“Our game couldn’t have been done on anything else,” confessed Choksi. “DSiWare was perfect for a student project, and it’s amazing that we’re now working with Konami, who are publishing it. The gameplay could only work on the DS, thanks to its unique set-up, and the service DSiWare offers is perfect for giving game like ours a chance to make it to the public.”

Who would have guessed only a few year’s ago, when Nintendo was perhaps rather cautious of the whole online concept, services like WiiWare and DSiWare would ever exist like this?