Beamdog president elaborates on Wii, Nintendo criticisms
Trent Oster caused caused a stir because of his comments surrounding WiiWare and Nintendo. The Beamdog president has now elaborated on his remarks in an interview with Ars Technica.
Oster believes the company’s first and only WiiWare effort, MDK2, was “probably the best version of that game on any console,” because of the Wii remote controls.
But even though MDK2 is a quality game, it hasn’t been selling well on the Wii Shop Channel. Less than 6,000 copies have been sold since May 2011.
Oster explained how Nintendo’s payout requirement – in which Wii Shop Channel games must attain 6,000 sales before the developer receives compensation – has left him disappointed:
“We haven’t seen a dime. Maybe some day in the future it crosses that magic threshold and at some point Nintendo cuts us a check. … How many developers have put stuff up to WiiWare that are sitting there at the 5,000 [or] 5,500 sales number and Nintendo is just sitting on the money. For some small developers that could be a big difference.”
Beamdog “assumed [the MDK2 Wii port] would be successful given the large sales volume of Wii”. However, Oster feels that there is just a small core of system owners remaining who are willing to support in-depth experiences such as MDK2. He speculates there is a large chunk of consumers out there who purchased a Wii, got Wii Sports (and perhaps Wii Fit), and that’s it.
Another issue Beamdog encountered during MDK2 WiiWare development was cutting down elements so that the game could fit within Nintendo’s 40MB file size limitation. Oster explained that the studio was “basically trim[ming] everywhere we could”. Some music pieces were removed, and audio was recompressed with a new codec.
Oster’s last complaint was the certification process for WiiWare titles. It took nine months for the stage to be completed, but Oster believes it could have wrapped up in less than a month.
He said:
“It just made us feel really low priority. We felt like they just weren’t paying attention.”
