Nintendo planning to offer WiiWare demos

Geez, it's about damn time. I hope they move on from downloadable to retail titles soon. I can name at least four games (LocoRoco 2, Patapon, God of War: Chains of Olympus, and ironically, World of Goo) that I got specifically thanks to the demo versions. I'm glad that Nintendo has finally figured out that demos can be extremely beneficial - and, unless the game is really bad, almost NEVER detrimental - to a game, particularly a niche title, which the Wii has a lot of. One has to question how much better some of the critically well-received yet notoriously underselling niche titles like Madworld, HotD: Overkill, and Dead Space Extraction might have sold had all of them had free downloadable demos. One of the main problems with the Wii right now is that a lot of gamers assume - and not without justification - that any third-party title is going to be either shovelware garbage or a B-list effort. Offering demos could immensely help gamers to separate the good games from the bad ones and raise awareness of quality third-party titles.
Slowly - very slowly - but surely, it seems like Nintendo finally starting to figure out how to have an online console and be developer-friendly. I liked the last line of the article, though.
Also, I hope this isn't another one of those features that ends up coming to Japan and Europe but inexplicably not the US. Nintendo of America's dropped that ball enough this generation.

WiiWare, for all the crap it has floating around on it, has the best over all content.

Meaning, if you threw all the WiiWare games into a bag, all the XBLA games into a bag and (maybe, I haven't thought about it quite as much, tbh) PSN games into a page, and reached in and randomly pulled one out, you'd have better odds of pulling out a decent, playable WiiWare game than you would in the XBLA and (probably) PSN bags.

WiiWare's problem is that, with a handful of exceptions, it doesn't have any marquee titles like XBLA and PSN get periodically. Pretty much the same problem the Wii itself has, really.

Hell, with the exception of the "Month of ____" things MS does twice a year, XBLA is nothing but pure garbage.

Dear Nintendo,

BRING THIS OUTSIDE OF JAPAN.

Love, Cypher

It's about time.

Finally!
Now since we're talking demos here, how about expanding that to all Wii games (not all literally but to the disc based games as well is what i meant)

"There was no word on whether Nintendo would also try the controversial "advertising" method of promotion, wherein a company tells its customers about its games."

LOL LOVE that statement!

That's been my biggest single complaint about Nintendo's handling of online since day one. This includes difficulty advertising games due to a lack of a release date at least 4 weeks ahead of time.

Finally! What the hell took so long? Gaming can be expensive. I don't want to load up the Wii with crap even if it is "only" $5. Now get me retail game demos and we are in business. For crying out loud. Hasn't Microsoft proven demos boost game sales? I wouldn't have bought Batman AA or Brutal Legend without trying them first.

Finally! I don't even look at WiiWare because I can't try any of the games before buying them.

Microsoft has set the standard by granting everyone the ability to try ALL of XBLA and XBLIG before buying. Being used to that, I now don't even consider rushing blindly into a game purchase.

I'm ecstatic that there's now a demo for Fat Princess. Now I know it's worth a purchase, and I'll be buying it soon.

Nintendo could also consider allowing trials of Virtual Console games. They could run for 4 or 5 minutes, then kick you out. That should be enough for most players to judge whether they're interested, would be easy and inexpensive for Nintendo to implement, and would probably increase sales, especially for the lesser-known games in the library.