Nintendo: WiiWare demo program was 'always' limited-time offer

You bought pokemon rumble?!?
What a boring game....
I downloaded the demo for a joke, and what a good joke it was

What do you mean with that?

I'm thinking that the pedometer will only come packaged with initial shipments of the game, eventually being sold separate at some point.

my reason is that i've just learned the downloads are tied to the purchasing console. period. i don't think most people realize you can't simply (or easily) move them to a different wii if yours dies. it should be much, much more clearly stated upfront. and after what microsoft has pulled with their virtual arcade, it's naive to think this anti-consumer trend is limited to nintendo.

I know that this is a bit off topic, but is nintendo going to release mario party on vc. That game was awesome. Is there a reason why they haven't or are they just being stupid?

Seriously! They really need to pull their heads out of their asses. I blatantly refuse to support Nintendo products anymore. The Wii my in-laws bought the kids for Christmas sits on my TV stand like a cancer. I can't think of a single company that is more out of touch with their core consumer than Nintendo.

Protip: Soccer moms aren't buying WiiWare games. You know who is? US. The people who are really into gaming (even 'casual' type gamers can fall into this if they're on friggin' Joystiq), and you know what we're all asking for? Frigging demos!

I can't even begin to count all the demos I've tried out XBLM titles. And you know what? I've purchased games that I absolutely never would have without a demo MANY times.

Dear Nintendo, 1999 called. It wants it's online gaming service back.

And I've not bought a LOT of games because of the demos, especially community and XBLA games.

In fact, I've bought exactly 1 game based on the demo--Arkham Asylum. The videos made it look much less interesting than it was.

Not entirely certain who's buying these WiiWare games, given that Hudson's "My Aquarium" has sat on top of the charts for so long

There is some question about whether Nintendo is "out of touch with their core consumer," either. Certainly they are out of touch with the hobbyist gamer whose demand has driven all of the features of the PS3/360, but you would presume that if they were doing something wrong, there would be some sort of indicator, and that could explain why they haven't changed their practices. Their online system isn't hurting sales, the lack of demos probably is, the lack of space definitely was, but Nintendo hasn't been clearly demonstrated on the fronts where they are the most out-of-touch (namely their archaic online structure, as well as the question of adding multimedia convergence features) that they are behind the times at all, because their sales haven't really been hurt, as near as can be seen anyway

Nintendo is in the peculiar position of being able to get away with making games that lack features that most publishers take for granted, and not only get away with it, but make mad bank doing it (see: NSMBWii. What exactly could they have gained by adding online to that? The damn thing sold 10 million in two months anyway)

tl;dr, Nintendo hasn't been shown the benefit to "getting with the times," and given the successes of their products, both casual and core, it really can't be demonstrated that they are out of touch with *their* core consumer. The lack of features only seems to further alienate marginal consumers, and not their dedicated buyers

"The demos will be available at least through the holidays"
-Shop Channel announcement

Oddly enough, North America was the only one to not give the cutoff date. Both Europe and Japan said Jan. 31.

Microsoft's demo mandate is one of the good things about the service.

What demo mandate? There are many games without demos on the 360.

... and it's also one of the most taken for granted things about the service as well.

XBLA titles must have a playable demo. Retail games are NOT required to have a demo.

Get it? Good.

Google works, try it some time.

Its not that they can't afford it, they're just testing the waters, is what I'm thinking..If sales went up on the wiiware games that had demos then expect more demos, if sales went down then don't hold your breath.

100 MBs? The full-sized games themselves cannot be any larger than 42 MBs. Server bandwidth certainly shouldn't be an issue

They have a measurement they use called, "conversion rate".

LIVE! was touting conversion rates for the first 3 years almost religiously throughout the 360's life. Geometry Wars was always used as the poster child for conversion rate.

I'm sure Nintendo is using the same metric.

In all seriousness: Yes. There are a ton of Wiiware games, just barely half of them are any good. BARELY half. ...or less than.

Either way, there's a lot of WiiWare, some say there's no good ones, but there are more than they think, but there's less than optimists think. .....yeaaahhh...

Even your SD card? You can play from your SD card now, y'know. A 1GB is enough to hold a ton of WiiWare games.

I know, but it seemed like too much work.

Too much work to play off of the SD card? That is just plain lazy.