Topic: Was WiiWare a Flop?

Who cares? eShop is where it's at now and I'll be more than happy to shoot down any argument that calls it a failure

There are some really good games on WiiWare, and I'm sure there are people still downloading them.

Has anybody else yet to notice the slight similarities between, "And Yet it Moves," and, "VVVVVV"? The flipping mechanic!

Eh, that seems to be a bit of a stretch, as the game flips with you. I'd liken it more towards Shift.

Also, yes, WiiWare was a flop. There were some successful games (World of Goo and potentially LostWinds are all I can think of that aren't first-party), but overall, there was a large amount of shovelware and many games didn't get the attention they deserved (Alien Crush Returns, SPACE INVADERS GET EVEN)

Game-wise, it's debatable, but when compared to XBLA and PSN, it is indeed a flop. The biggest problem with WiiWare wasn't the games though, it was the stupid way Nintendo handled the system.
There was tons of shovelware on it. Anyone who says otherwise needs to just look at many of the titles. To say that there were not good games would be a straight up lie, however. World of Goo, Swords and Soldiers, Space Invaders Get Even, Lost Winds, Bit Trip series, and anything by Shinen are some standouts. The thing is though, there wasn't enough draw for developers to make games for the service, mainly due to the horrible way Nintendo treated devs in paying them. You see, Nintendo wouldn't give devs money they made of the game until it sold a certain amount of copies. This was, in Nintendo's mind, a way to incite devs to not make crappy games for the service. However, this prevented certain quality titles to make the devs no money because not enough people bought their game. Some of the reasons why this would happen can be accredited right to Nintendo. Nintendo, not the devs, set the prices for the games on the service. Nintendo also did very little advertising for the service. Demos were something that didn't exist for years, and even then, the demos weren't permanent until relatively recently. And lets not forget about the totally unnecessary 40mb file restriction. Also, the download threshold became a further drawback as less people turned on their Wiis due to many of the people migrating towards their 360s and PS3s due to more quality games being released for those systems. I'd say it's a flop in that regard.
I hope Nintendo uses the lessons it learned from WiiWare to make an acceptable download service on the WiiU.

the whole WW was handled badly by nintendo what ever way you look at, but it was no excuse for some of the 3rd party devs on there not to do their own advertising.
there`s also the fact that if these smaller dev`s didn`t have the cash behind them, why would the risk doing a deal with nintendo in the first place, it`s been well documented that nintendo have had shady business practices since the NES days and that alone would have rung alarm bells before they even contacted nintendo.
also, with the dev`s whinning about not getting paid, they knew what they were signing into when they agreed to work on games for the wii. also, as i`ve already said, advertising is a contributing factor for game sales. that coupled with the fact that alot of them could have put out better games to begin with would have been ideal. both of which are contributing factors of game sales.
where game quality is concerned, how hard would it have been for them to sit down with their own games and play them when they`re finished? i know that there must be a certain emotional envolvement when making a game, but i`m sure that if i had sat down and played one of my own games and didn`t enjoy playing it, i would want to figure out where the game went wrong and improve it before getting clearances from nintendo. a working game does not equate big sales if the game sucks.

in the past no wiiware game appealed enough to me so I have never bought one... just got a few demos.
My Wii instead is FULL of VC games!

What was the point, the only Wiiware title I ever bought was Dr Mario online. Developers just kinda ignored WiiWare

Yeah, that's definitely true. Nintendo ignored it quite a lot and that was a mistake. It's also beginning to happen to the eshop now. Besides the 2 pokemon titles in october , there are no Nintendo published titles announced for the future in the eshop (correct me if I'm wrong) . Nintendo obviously understood they needed to get titles out there (& published Pullblox, Dillon's Rolling Western etc.) and now they think that that's enough, and can't be bothered putting anything out.

It isn't a flop. Along with the Virtual Console it is for many people the main reason to buy the console. And it most distinguishes the Wii from one and a half GCs duct tapped together imo.

Great service, lots of great games, but since "flop" pertains to sales......potentially it was a flop. The budgets were low, as well, so maybe the ratio isn't bad at all compared to the other services.

It's a question we can't really answer.

For developers? The majority of them yes. For Nintendo? They still made money off of it.
The whole "rumor" floating around that Nintendo is offering a bigger percentage to developers for the digital content now, makes sense because of how reluctant many are/will be going forward developing any digital content for the Wii U.

Sure, you will see some initial push with the games, and those will most likely do the best if they are not established names...but Nintendo really hurt itself with third parties on the Wii, because of the model they had setup. So, it's now Nintendo trying to get developers back, otherwise, why offer more money to them, if they were already lining up to support it?

The only Wii ware game I care about is World of Goo

In the end, WiiWare was more of a kiddie pool experience for the Big N - to see if they could really do well with digital downloads.

Now with the eShop, they're moving on up.

I wanted more sequels to old games.

Mega Man 9 and 10 were good examples, although they don't always have to be retro style graphics.

Castlevania Rebirth and Contra Rebirth were good too, but were named as remakes and spin-offs rather than the next main game in their respective series. If Castlevania was called Castlevania 5 instead of The Adventure Rebirth, it would probably have gotten more recognition. Likewise with Contra Rebirth, if it had been named Contra 5, people would probably sit up and take more notice.

How I look at it, as far as the downloadable games from the Wii / DS generation.

Virtual Console > Wii Ware > DSiWare