There's a great interview with Sydney developers, Nnooo, about their Wiiware title called Pop up at Gamespot AU. Nnooo creative developer, Nic Watt answers questions about his casual bubble popping game and provides some interesting insights into the Wiiware distribution system, the freedom and help that Nintendo provided for an approved developer like Nnooo, the classification process that developers have to handle for Wiiware, as well as the casual games market. From Gamespot AU...
(Nic) For us, what something like WiiWare offers us is we invested all of our own money into this product. By releasing Pop on a distribution service, all of the money that comes back is split between us and Nintendo. That means that we can take those funds and directly invest it into making new games. If we were to make a disc-based game model, there's an awful lot more people that are sharing in that pie. What that means then, especially for a developer like us, is it would cost 5 million dollars to make a really good disc-based game.
It seems like there's so many options available for small, independent developers these days, and I'm hoping to hear a lot more startups making inroads to Wiiware, Xbox Live, Playstation store, and iPhone games. For the full interview, head on over to Gamespot AU!