The Benny (Macho)

With the WiiWare service coming soon, in addition to the Virtual Console and game saves, people have been questioning just how they are going to store all of this on the Wii's 512MB flash drive, speculating that there may be a hard drive accessory on the way. In a Gamasutra interview with "Nintendo's in-house Public Relations manager, Eric Walter" it's revealed that Nintendo's solution is to... delete games to make space and download them again later:

It could immediately be pointed out that Ipod songs are presumably almost all in the 3-10MB range (I don't have one myself to be sure) and the player itself has significantly larger capacity hard drives than the Wii. It's not a horrible idea in theory, assuming Nintendo intend to support the download service forever, but it's also not a very good one. I personally much prefer to have a physical backup of anything like this over something that you only have access to as long the service you purchased it from still exists; it's just too intangible if it's sitting on somebody else's server somewhere.

I wouldn't take Mr. Walter's comments as gospel though, from reading the rest of the interview it's obvious that he was more interested in dodging questions and saying how great Nintendo is than anything else. Comments like "people don't mind the friend codes" can only come from somebody who only has a very vague connection to reality.

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The poster formerly known as Macho Man!