Wii dev kit to be dirt cheap
Published by ZephyrWest 2 years, 1 month ago in News.During a Q&A session at the Nintendo Corporation Management Briefing, Shinji Hatano revealed that the Wii development kit would be relatively inexpensive.
Question: I recall GameCube received a warm welcome by the software developers before the launch. Comparing with the pre-launch period of GameCube, how differently are the third parties evaluating Wii now, and does Nintendo deal with the third parties differently?
Hatano: As Iwata said in his presentation, the majority of the third parties were putting game graphics as the top priority. However, especially after observing the sales trend of DS since the end of last year, their priority appears to be shifting to the unique game ideas. I believe those who have attended E3 this year among today’s audience will understand that Nintendo was the only company that showed different exhibits based upon different concepts from any other exhibitors. I understand they (third parties) were wondering before the E3 show what future course they should take, and the general impression the third parties have had with E3 this year, as I understand it, was that it was helpful in mapping a future course. Since E3, almost all the domestic software makers have approached us and requested detailed information on Wii and requested hands-on experiences with the Wii software we showed at E3 for those developers who did not attend E3. Such developers requests are increasing. Since the end of last month until around the 20th of this month, we have been conducting hands-on opportunities either at our Tokyo branch or at their facilities depending on their conveniences. I’m sure they will come up with unique ideas to create great software, and we are more than willing to cooperate with them. We are also intending to provide them with a dev kit at an inexpensive price, say, at little more than 200,000 yen. We cannot disclose the software manufacturing price for third-party publishers, but they will be at the same level of GameCube.
In case you were wondering, 200,000 yen is about $1740 USD. This may not seem inexpensive to us common folk but for game companies, its pretty darn cheap. The dev kit for the Sony PSP is about $4,200 USD so it’s pretty cheap when thought about in terms with dev kits for other systems.
So why would gamers care? Lower dev kit costs means more and cheaper games. Independent game studios with tight budgets can’t afford ridiculously priced dev kits so they may gravitate towards the Wii for its inexpensive dev kit. This also means that games will be cheaper and more affordable for the end user. As an end user, I can tell you that cheaper is always better.
[via IGN]
I agree that this is great news for both gamers and software development companies.
I thought I had heard somewhere that the Wii dev kit would be affordable to many people, but perhaps I was misinformed or misunderstood the information. Sad news for me, but I am glad to hear that it will be cheaper than most other consoles development kits - undoubtedly leading to more and cheaper games as you mentioned.
ive had to do research on the Xbox 360, the Wii and the PS3 and after all the information I have gathered for my report I can honestly say I have fallen for the Wii. The Wii has the most origional form of gameplay I have seen (which is getting to be typical of Nintendo, but we love them for it, Eg. DS) and it being the cheapest of the three consoles, how can you possibly love any other console? oh yeah, their dev kit is apparently being given out for free to some development companies and even if you aren’t lucky enough to be apart of one of these development companies that got one for free… it is almost 1/4 the price of the PS3 dev kit?! Nintendo, to be sure, really do understand the gaming market and what the player wants to see and gives it to them.
Anyone wanna buy one?
Hi there,
I want to get the wii dev kit for our company. We have started a small project and our project is based on wii platform.
It will be really very gratefull to me if you could assist me regarding this.
Warm Regards,
Mrinal
I am interested in buying the dev kit. Anybody selling it?
Currently my site is all screwed to hell, but I am beginning a Mac developed Wii game with the power of the UNITY game engine. The latest version allows for Wii Publishing to the Wii Dev Kit. For my sake, i’d better get a good paying job in the mean time to bankroll this project as I will also be upgrading to a iMac 24″ with an Nvidia 512MB card and 4 gigs of ram. The current Mac Mini computer could be used a game file resource server on a direct Apple Talk File Sharing connection.
So look forward for a game by;
TGI-Media Entertainment