Topic: An Interesting Article on the Wasted Potential of DSiWare

Well, i only have two minis (tetris and echoes) and i like them.
Also, on the PSP online store you can buy full games (which from the 3DS screens, it will probably not happen) and older games, which you can also share with other consoles.
I am not siding with Sony, but i think their online shopping is just better.

I really hope nintendo makes things easier for devs with the 3DS, even though i am satisfied with my DSiWare i would probably like it better without these "small rules" nintendo has imposed.

I guess since I stirred the pot here, I might as well follow up with some comments. First, overall I am happy with the DSiWare service. I have bought many decent games on it. Though I thought the article was interesting, I thought the author was a tad bit ignorant about the nature of industry in a capitalistic society. To argue that a game platform is unsuccessful due to the amount of shovelware on it is a complete fallacy. That would mean that the DS, Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 are all failures because there is a lot of shovelware on all of them. Just like there are bad albums recorded and bad books written. Where there is money to be made, someone will always try to produce a quick substandard product to make some easy profit. It is then up to the buyer to inform him or herself of the product before buying.

Second, I do agree that Nintendo overprices their downloads. In my mind, they are competing with two different markets. First, they compete with the other downloadable platforms such as iOS and PSP minis, most of which offer their games at a cheaper price and may have a better shopping experience. Second, they compete with the used game market, where gamers will use their limited funds to buy retail games at cheaper prices. For instance, I could go on DSiWare and buy DoDoGo! or I could go to Gamestop and buy a game like Star Fox Command used for the same price. Now, downloading is more convenient but in many cases a gamer can get more substantial gameplay out of buying a used game.

Third, I do think that DSiWare has a future in a post-3DS world. If Nintendo plans to continue the DSiWare service with the eShop, then the cheaper development costs for DSiWare may be enticing to smaller developers. Again, I would like to see a price drop and maybe others would like to see Nintendo ease restrictions. This way, DSiWare becomes analogous to the Xbox Live Indie Games platform, with 3DSWare being more like Xbox Live Arcade.

To follow up on my comment that DSiWare has decline over the latter half of 2010, my basis lays upon two following assumptions:

1.) The health of a platform is correlated to first party support, and Nintendo has published exactly one game (Snapdots) on DSiWare in the last six months.

2.) Looking over the releases on DSiWare for the past few months, I can honestly say that very little has been released that interests me. I know this is subjective to each person's tastes, and this is also not to say that there aren't DSiWare releases I still want to buy, but those are all from the first half of the year. At this time last year there were games that I wanted to buy coming out almost every week.