Nintendo To Offer Digital Retail Game Sales For 3DS, Wii U

Ninty supremo Satoru Iwata has unveiled the company’s plans to delve into the digital retail market, starting with New Super Mario Bros 2.

For the 3DS, the aforementioned NSMB2 will be the first Nintendo title to be released simultaneously physically and digitally. Although Nintendo have not revealed a date for this service with New Super Mario Bros 2 releasing this August it’ll likely be sometime before then.

Interestingly, in a move that will keep brick and mortar retailers onside, digital games will also be available in regular stores. It’s easy to envisage a situation similar to the PSN titles that can be bought in GAME/Gamestation. It will be up to retailers to set prices for the digital titles though, so we could well see them attempting to undercut Nintendo’s digital prices.

Nintendo also confirmed that the service would be heading to Wii U from day one as well. There’s no word on whether digital releases will be cheaper than physical copies so we’ll likely have to wait and see on that front.

Source: Rocket Chainsaw

 

8 Comments

  1. Nice so similar to the Vita strategy.

    However no Hard drive in Wii-U may pose problems especially concerning DLC. Yes you can add portable drives/HD cards etc but surely a basic cheapo HDD won’t add to much?

    • If Ninty’s going HD then they bound to add a HDD

    • Is there really no hard drive included with the Wii U?
      Just one more thing to put my off from nintendo.

      • That’s the case as far as I’ve heard. So they’re planning on releasing digital downloads to a console without harddrive…

        They have got to put one in that white box of theirs or they’re toast come next gen without proper digital releases and DLC.

  2. I believe that it comes with an 8 GB flash drive (last I heard), which can probably be expanded with SD cards or USB drives. This cuts production costs, heat, power, size and another point of failure. Games will most likely play from disc without install (remember, like the old days) with the drive space for dlc, games and patches. Alternatively they can also use part of the flash drive as buffer space since its faster than HDD access.
    I don’t see an issue with this unless they allow inefficient use of space and games which need monster patching.
    Remember, they’re still touting it as a games machine rather than a complete media centre.

    • Yes but as shown with this gen loading purely of disc is not the best way in terms of speed. Unless Nintendo’s proprietary optical media is fast?

      But this is last years rumoured specs etc we’ll know for sure this e3 when full specs are announced.

    • It’s an issue because it makes you have to buy an external HDD if you want DLC or digital downloads and it also splits the userbase into those with extra space and those without. This also takes up a USB-slot, more space by your TV and means that your performance will vary depending on what external memory you use.

      Nintendo are being stupid hipsters (and I’m not saying that just to be a hater, I really wanted the next-gen Nintendo, but the Wii U is ticking all the wrong boxes for me) , if they want to cut production costs, the they shouldn’t have gone with a large expensive tablet-controller.

  3. Doesn’t dlc itself, regardless of storage medium split user base?
    Also USB is my second guess. My first would be an SDHC card which fits neatly inside the machine.

    If you also noticed I mentioned using the flash drive as a buffer, thus negating potential storage speed issues.
    But yes, these specs aren’t final by any means.

    Lastly, if these are the sort of boxes that you have as a checklist instead of things like, will the games be great fun? Then maybe the Wii U isn’t for you at all.

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