Wii not getting a hard drive because "it's like an iPod"
By Nilay Patel 
posted November 2nd 2007 4:33AM
posted November 2nd 2007 4:33AM
Although the Wii's Virtual Console channel has been a smashing success, there's always a price for fame: quite a few gamers are running up against the storage roadblocks of Nintendo's console and starting to wonder about expansion options beyond SD cards -- like, say, a hard drive. Sadly, however, Ninty's not having any of it, with Nintendo of America PR manager Eric Walter saying that "we really don't want people storing every single game they buy on their drive." Sounds silly, but since VC titles are yours for keeps, Nintendo's position is that you can delete games and "go back and get them any time," or, presumably, build a small library of SD cards. This odd line of reasoning also led Walter to say that he likens the situation "to putting music on your iPod; you listen to it for a while, and then you get tired of it, and you pull it off, and you put some new stuff on." Clearly Walter does not know how often we listen to the Clash on our iPods -- or how often we rock Super Mario Brothers 1 through 64. Either way, it looks like the mothership has spoken for now -- looks like it's up to the third parties to figure out a way to make it all better.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
How much storage do these games take any - i'm assuming less than 16MB for most of them so surely you can fit more than youd want on a 4GB card (i'm not sure as I wouldn't buy an old game on wii as thats what MAME is for so this is just my speculation based on DS game sizes)
In principle, we could just slap in extra SD cards for more storage. In practice, you can't play anything off an SD card (presumably as part of the DRM protection of the games), and at the Wii's SD card transfer rates, you would in many cases be quicker just re-downloading the game.
Part of the point of an ipod is that it's convenient to have all of your music at your fingertips so you don't have to swap out cd's...
the reason why I have an iPod is to store all my music and not have to swap it out constantly. The reason why I have no interest at all in a nano or touch or iPhone is because the storage capacities are so incredibly small they're useless to me. The reason why I have extra drives attached to my computer is to access all my files instead of having to sort through endless amounts of CDs and DVDs to find things "in storage". Nintendo just doesn't seem to understand that not everyone wants to bother with swapping out cards and redownloading things over and over again. Especially if I'm just suddenly in the mood to play some random VC game I own, I'm not going to bother to either figure out which SD card I have it backed up on or, even worse, navigating through the incredibly slow online store to redownload a game (especially a N64 game) that would take forever and I might just go do something else. The same thing with my iPod, if I feel like listening to a song, I want to listen to it right then, not have to hook it up to my computer and re-sync, which in that case isn't always possible since its portable and if I'm out I wouldn't be able to even do that, defeating the purpose of even having the device in the first place. I know Nintendo is extremely concerned about piracy and security, but there has to be a solution they can find, one that's better than just "buy 100 SD cards". The console has only been out for a year and my memory is already more than full and every new game I want to buy I find myself clearing off old games just so I can download the new one. And especially with more and more N64 games out, it only takes a couple of them to take up all your system's memory.
Some of us aren't as spastic as the rest of you. Some of us have discipline and control. Some of us don't go through life carting around everything we've ever created or ever owned, afraid that on the off chance we might want to listen to or watch something, we won't have it with us.
I have about 30GB of audio, but I only have about 2GB on my iPod, even though my iPod can hold more. The time I don't waste searching through the other 28GB looking for a particular song is time I can spend doing something productive.
It doesn't take much time at all to scroll through music, especially with the newer ipods letter scrolling. More time is wasted swapping out music, or in this case, re-downloading games, then scrolling through it.
If you're sitting there on your ipod you're probably not doing anything productive anyways, and if you're playing your wii you're definitely not being productive.
maybe he meant the shuffle?
its like he doesn't realize that the original and most prominent current ipods have hard drives for this very reason, to store enough content to eliminate the need to swap many memory cards.
Yeah, except the most popular iPod is the Nano, which totally doesn't have a hard drive and has a pretty limited amount of storage space. But hey, you can just hook it up to your computer and swap out some songs around if you want to.
Except, the lack of more built-in storage is obviously not the reason for the Nano's success. If the Wii was meant to be worn while jogging and was the size of a credit card, maybe the comparison would be fair... but it seems like there's some other reason for not supporting hard disks on the Wii.
Hey Eric, next time just say "it's to keep costs down" ok? Because you don't make a whole lot of sense with your current reasoning.
Looks like "I fought the Law, and the Law won."
...for now.
Eric either has the biggest music collection i know of or he doesnt realize that the new ipod classic comes with an 80gb hard drive as standard, yeah loads of people have more than 20000 songs. Thats only about ten thousand cds after all.
in fact look at this quote straight from the apple site
"Decisions, decisions. Who needs ’em? Why should you have to choose what to put on your iPod?"
20000 songs= 10000, 2 song cds???
where do you get these mysterious cds with 2 songs on them, last time I checked the cds in my collection had an average of 8-10 songs bringing the number of cds needed to hve 20000 songs down to about 2000 cds, not such an unreasonable number for someone to own. In fact, between vinyl and cd I probably have close to that, but I havnt counted to know.
Justin said:
[quote] 20000 songs= 10000, 2 song cds???
where do you get these mysterious cds with 2 songs on them, last time I checked the cds in my collection had an average of 8-10 songs bringing the number of cds needed to hve 20000 songs down to about 2000 cds, not such an unreasonable number for someone to own. In fact, between vinyl and cd I probably have close to that, but I havnt counted to know.
[/quote]
Probably c1906w is Japanese, and the best-selling CDs in Japan are singles, each one containing only an average of two songs, the remainder of the CD space being filled with either remixes or instrumental versions of the same [average] two songs.
he's not Japaneses he's just not reading his posts or doing math this early in the morning i meant 2000 CDs either way thats a hell of a lot of music.
I would reiterate my question to N: where they going to put all the WiiWares then?
Any decent looking game would weight about 100MB. Internal flash would hold top 3-4 such games. Copying from SD (which is terribly slow for some unknown reason (or has Wii cheapest shittiest flash inside?)) is also not much better than redownloading every time (shopping channel is also terribly slow btw).
I play like 5 to 10 games simultaneously. I'm not a gamer per se - I do not beat games, I play them. I play them as long as I feel like it. For me that would unacceptable to be forced to do extra manipulations to just play the game I want to play right now. You know, on iPod (1) USB transfer rates are great and (2) my iPod has 8GB of flash. That makes hell a lot of difference...
Buy a better SD card (either 60x or even better 150x) I have a 150x and have not noticed any significant slowness loading or copying pictures/movies or save game data.
SD cards from RiData and A-data are as good, if not better than the standard cards from Sandisk (and cheaper too.) Shop around.
Same SD card in PC doesn't expose any performance troubles.
And network... I have PC (wired) and notebook (wireless) - both show no trouble hitting 1MB/s. But on Wii - e.g. updating Internet channel (which is few megs) took few minutes(!). But should have taken only few seconds.
1MB\s huh? you have a fo line driect to your internet provider? orther wise you are getting one Mb which is 1/8 or that at tops. so no wonders it takes acouple minutes for a wii update. Moron.
Hard drive or not I can care less. At least I have a choice on the memory. The only downfall I see is that these SDs are SMALL. Just like my PSP before the 4gb came out, I lost a few MS. Saving my VC games on small SDs is very risky. Espeically with my nephews playing with it. At least they could of made the Wii HCSD compatible and use those new 4gb and if there is a 8gb instead of only 2gb cards.
> [...] looks like it's up to the third parties to figure out a way to make it all better.
Yeah, it seems so. For example, Big N in all the years didn't managed to come up with anything what can beat usability and convenience of DS's M3/R4. Changing disks/cartridges is so-o last century.
Let's hope some Chinese/Korean/etc folks would crack Wii wide open - for more storage, games off USB hard drives and (most importantly) cheats, etc.
No! No! It's not like an iPod at all! iPods have hard drives! They don't rely on SD Cards for storage. Hell, you can't even access your game data from the SD Card. It's almost pointless to even have one. Depending on your Internet connection it may take just as long to re-download something as it would be to copy it over again from an SD Card. Boo Nintendo! Boo!
Nintendo should just get with the times and accept the inevitable... eventually you all are going to download one too many of those VC titles and where are you going to keep them? In a library of SD cards? That's so stupid. What about your pictures? I bet it'd be nice to be able to keep all those in one centralized location... like an IPOD!?!?!?!!!1 SHIT! Nintendo has an ass for a head sometimes! Think about it guys... just like Microshit, you too could charge your loyal fanbase $100 for a 20 gig hard drive!!! or you can be a little nicer to your fan boys and let them plug-in to that otherwise useless usb port in the ass of your cute little poor excuse for a "next gen" console. I'm pretty sure you all have part of that WD MyBook partitioned off for something... but that thing hasn't come along just yet... Now everyone join me in holding their breath, waiting for Nintendo to grow up. Damn... we're all doomed!!!
A Wii harddrive is simply pointless for the average user. The point is that you don't need to store your massive music collection on your video game console; that is what your iPod is for. The things you store on your Wii and SD card are VC games and saves. You are given plenty of room with both and being able to redownload VC games or storing them elsewhere should be seen as useful tool not a hinderance to your gameplay.
I thought the point of this article was to point out that people DON'T have enough room for all of their VC titles. Just because you say that theres plenty of room, doesn't make it true for everyone else. I can fill up the internal memory with saved Boogie videos alone.
One more time we get it confirmed that company's regardless of "smartness" just don't understand the internet,
Nintendo's Wii have been a success mostly help by the internet, however the company ignore this 100%
I'm in Vietnam my Wii is from the US, ( Nintendo don't sell a VN version and I had to pick US or Jap with Jap text )
Well I cant use the online functions because my credit cards are not issues in the US, so no point to buy extra online stuff, online games forget it.
Time zone and news are wrong, and I can't get a webbrowser ( I still have the game ) Nintendo just don't get any of my USD
Well my parents go a Wii as well, the Idea was for them to send e-mails to my kids and photos and share the games results
I see the wii platform as safe for my kids and have no issue with having them do this, only problem is, you can't get a mail account if you not in the US
and they are in Denmark, and we are in Vietnam so no e-mail, Photos or any other thing....
Now you may order a “remote jacket” yes you may get one if you are in the US, Shame on you Nintendo and shame on you for not offering
a solution to World around you, a solution that works like the world around you, if you product on the internet and cane be shipped to any location
you need to offer solutions for this, don't forget who is your users, Shame on you......... ....
I don't regret getting 2 Wii's I have fun so do my kids and my parents, but I'm only getting 90% of what you get if you was in the US and that's
makes me think next time I'm out shopping, other Jap companies have the same problems ex Nikon just to put one forward
uhm, wii jackets are available in Europe and i presume other countries that sell the Wii. The wii isnt out in Vietnam yet, why would they send support for a non-existing platform. :/ It sucks I know.
It's got nothing to do with storage - Ninty doesn't want to offer up a hard drive because it will probably be hacked to play full Wii games from it. Just like what happened to the Xbox.
I don't really see a problem with that. You pay for the licence of the game, so you don't need to keep a copy of it.
I believe most people who have a Wii also have decent internet access at home. So waiting a few minutes to re-download a game won't kill anyone.
I don't really see a problem with that. You pay for the licence of the game, so you don't need to keep a copy of it.
I believe most people who have a Wii also have decent internet access at home. So waiting a few minutes to re-download a game won't kill anyone.
The Wii has 2 USB ports. Why can't they turn those on and let people hook up flash drives or external HDDs to store games? I have a bunch of VC games downloaded and am fearful of running out of space soon (Star Fox 64 the other night just about put me over the edge). I guess if it comes down to it, I'll go buy one of the Wii SD cards.
Should Nintendo give Wii a hard drive? vote:
http://pollsb.com/polls/poll/3468/should-nintendo-offer-a-hard-drive-for-wii
It's a psychological thing. If you accumulate a lot of games, and they are all stored on the system. You will feel less inclined to buy new games unless it is totally necessary.
Nintendo wants you to buy more games!!!
It's a psychological thing. If you accumulate a lot of games, and they are all stored on the system. You will feel less inclined to buy new games unless it is totally necessary
or equally you buy a load of games, your system gets full and you don't want to lose access to your games so you stop buying them!
But really tho, it all about the Clash.
If this thing is family orientated, shurely having a HDD next to it would mean a Wiimote going straight through the poor thing, or at least it being knocked over? At least the SD card is in the Wii, so if the Wii does get knocked over and breaks, the card with all the games will be pretty safe. If you break the HDD, you've lost quite a bit of change there; games and HDD.
I'm a casual gamer and an old guy (in that order) and I'm pleased that at least one of the latest generation consoles is relatively easy to use. Based on sales, I suspect there are a lot of people out here who feel the same. A hard drive would be a wonderful addition, but only if it doesn't turn the Wii into another PC. Most hard drives are error prone devices that regularly interfere with the joys of computing. They may be suitable for those solitary gamers who crouch over keyboards in dingy basements or gaming rooms in old shopping strips and malls, but the vast majority of gamers are happy to be liberated from crashes, registry errors, worms, viruses, pop-up ads, tracking software, fragmentation, disk cleanup, and the scores of other problems a PC encounters.
It's a joy for my grandchildren and me to be able to just turn on the unit and play!
It's not like this HDD will be used for much, what they're asking for is using the HDD as an alternative to SD cards. you don't HAVE to use a HDD, but if you so wish... You can.
I think Nintendo's just stubornly trying not to put focus on the fact that the Wii Menu is ridiciously small. In the future, when there's tons of WiiWare titles, Wii Applications and VC games, you'll want to have lots of slots on the Wii menu or have different sub-menus for VC games and WiiWare games.
You may also want to keep a lot of the VC games you have on the HDD because you may not have the internet to re-download them in a few months for one reason or another.
Personally, I think Nintendo's just trying to get everyone online so they can keep blocking people from doing what they want on the console. Wii Firmware 3.0 blocked ActionReplay for Gamecube, which shot us Gamecube importers right in the foot. I now cannot play my import coppies of Donkey Konga and DK2 JAP on my PAL Wii. Can't tell you how much I love Nintendo for THAT. And they can also keep on-top of those mod-chippers and pirates through Firmware updates.
At the moment, this is a non-issue, however I think if Nintendo's going to keep dictating to us what we can and cannot do on the console, especially games which worked on the GC which no longer work on the Wii... Well, it's going to turn pear-shaped for Nintendo.
> [...] but only if it doesn't turn the Wii into another PC.
When next year WiiWares would arrive - they would be taking lots of space.
That's the whole point of adding hard drive: to allow to have more games on Wii.
Probably even some games might cache some data off game disk to HDD, since they have much better seek times compared to DVDs. Looking into future, 8GB USB stick might allow to have lots of games right on your Wii without need to reload/copy something from somewhere.
P.S. It is rather stupid (right now at least) to even require Wii be connected to network since number of networked games is insignificant.
P.P.S. And if game would be run off HDD, then the annoying noise of DVD spinning would also go.
I'm just wondering if Nintendo just can't figure out how to get a game to run off of a hard drive or SD card......
Or maybe the USB HDDs will impact on the speed of the games. Nintendo obsess about their loading times and inconsistant USB 1.0 Hard Drives could be very slow.
It's so frustrating when a company just flat-out ignores its customers, especially when it's based on some misguided principle like this. Normally these types of decisions and justifications ("people don't want everything on it, it's like an ipod!" ...huh?!) get shot down in board meetings, but occasionally some out-of-touch douchebag executive decides to pipe up and offer his "expertise," and no one has the balls to tell him he's wrong. We, as consumers, lose out.
That just doesn't make sense.
If this is the case, Nintendo needs to make it easier for you to download these games.
Maybe instead of downloading the actual game, maybe we could just download a shortcut to the game. That way, every time we go to play it, it'll download it again and cache it...
If Nintendo would properly support SDHC this HD talk would be a moot point. SDHC can support Memory cards from 4-32GB. and is physically backwards compatible with SD. Support can potentially be implemented in a F/W update.
If they'd allow us to play games off an SD card i'd be fine with using 2gb SD cards all day long. They need to enable this feature, even If I have to pay 1000 wii points for it!!!
I wonder if you could take a 1gb flash chip and solder it onto the mainboard of the Wii. After all, that's what we are all bickering about: The internal storage on the Wii, where all the channels and save games are stored.
I mean, assuming that Nintendo didn't do something horrendously stupid and hardcode the size of the flash inside the Wii's Firmware... It should be a simple swap.
Anybody have the guts to try?