Nintendo announces Wii Virtual Console pricing
The word is out, and it's not looking too bad for retro gamers in search of a fix. Nintendo's own president, Saturo Iwata, has announced that pricing for downloadable games in the Wii's Virtual Console will range from 500 to 1,000 Yen, about $4.50 to $8.99 in USD. This is in comparison to Microsoft's "points" system, which has you spending somewhere between $5 and $12.50 for a title, and whose library is considerably more limited than what Nintendo has planned for the Wii at launch -- which should include those tasty 1st party titles. Iwata also mentioned some of Nintendo's plans for DS integration, which could include use as a touch screen controller for the Wii, DS game play on the Wii (ala GameBoy Player), and demo downloads via the Wii. It's not hard to see why Nintendo would want to closely tie the two consoles together, given the crazy success of the DS, we just hope Nintendo isn't thinking they can get by with the retro and DS dollars without giving us a next-next-gen gaming experience on top of it.
Update: As pointed out in the glad-to-have-them-back comments, this announcement was only for the pricing of new games available on the Virtual Console, with no word as to what retro titles will go for. We'll keep our eyes peeled, but for now just chalk this one up to some mistranslation and as a decent indicator of pricing to come.
[Via Slashdot]
