The Wii is like a fridge, says Nintendo PR
One of our biggest frustations with the Wii is the limited data storage. The onboard memory is limited to a paltry 512MB, and with so many goodies available on the Virtual Console it gets filled up very quickly. With further memory gobbling channels like WiiWare on the horizon, the problem is going to become much more obvious.
We’re not the only ones concerned about the issue. Wired News sat down for an interview with Perrin Kaplan, Nintendo of America’s vice president of sales and marketing, and grilled her on the subject. Her response was laughable and quite insulting, so we’ve reprinted it in full.
Wired News: Another issue that’s coming down the pipe as more and more content appears on Virtual Console and with Wii Ware coming out is the issue of space on the Wii. You can’t run stuff off of the SD card. It all has to be on the onboard memory. Are you looking at solutions to expand this?
Perrin Kaplan: I think that Nintendo loves to have a really clean approach to what they’re doing, and the idea is to not have too much of a packrat syndrome, where you’ve got so much stuff stacked up that… you want to just have products that you’re actually going to continue to use. Virtual Console’s a really good idea. And it’s on the server, so one Chris Kohler purchases it, it’s always his. You can download it again. So it’s a matter of what do I want to play today. I think we also did the tradeoff: for the price, the size, the flexibility of the system, for us to do all kinds of things. Instead of having a huge box.
WN: At the same time, my memory is full. I went to download the Neo Geo games, and it’s like, “you need x blocks of memory.†So it’s like playing a puzzle game, and I have to look at all my memory and think, what do I not want anymore, okay, I’ll move it over here… And it’s a laborious process. There’s just no plans to change this right now?
PK: We’re always talking. But if your refrigerator’s full, you’ve got to pull something out and put something else back in. That’s just the normal issue of space. I mean, really, are you using every single thing on there?
That’s got to be the stupidest thing we’ve ever heard. Kaplin is talking nonsense. The Wii is not a fridge, it’s a games console. And if we’re paying for a game, we expect to be able to keep and store a copy of our purchase, regardless of Nintendo’s assurances we can download it anytime from their servers.
If the Wii didn’t have DRM that prevented us from running VC games off an SD card, then it might not be such a big deal. We could swap out SD cards like you would a CD or DVD. But we can’t, and the lack of a proper storage medium just makes the situation doubly frustrating. In the name of all that’s holy, sort it out!
Loading ...
October 14th, 2007 at 3:22 am
I don’t get it…
If SD cards have a DRM scheme called CPRM (The “S” from “SD card” comes from “secure”), why don’t they use it to protect games in the cards from being copied to other Wiis?
They can encrypt the games in the card and only the original “host” could decrypt it to play the games. How hard could it be?
I just don’t get it…
October 14th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
[...] The Wii is like a fridge, says Nintendo PR (Wii Wii) [...]
October 15th, 2007 at 9:23 am
a fridge? whatever.
Games are not there to be played and then discarded. I mean you never keep putting food back into a fridge after you ate it right?
January 9th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
from my understanding vc games you dont use you can take out but you can also reload them for free once you first download them so in that case you still have access to everything you downloaded so you can play everything still …is just a matter of choicing which you think you wont be playing for a while. but if you decide to play it again you can load again for free.