Nintendo announces WiiWare

Nintendo announced WiiWare today, which is a game creation and publication service for the Wii. Basically, it allows developers to create downloadable video games and other content that can be sold on the Wii Shop Channel for a few Wii Points.

It’s supposed to allow independent and some large developers to release their games over the Wii Shop Channel without having to go through a publisher. For the players, this is a good thing because Nintendo states that games can be released at lower prices (according to Nintendo, WiiWare has a bunch of pricing options) so players don’t have to shell out a lot of money to play an independent developer game.

With WiiWare, there could be a possibility we will start to see new homebrews (except they would be good quality [we hope] and we would have to pay for them) appearing on the Wii Console. WiiWare content will start to appear early next year (2008) on the Wii Shop Channel.