Harmonix: Lack of Memory Means No DLC for Rock Band

As Wii owners, we are used to the way Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 owners look down on us for having an inferior system. But it isn’t just players who are being critical.

Harmonix, originators of the Guitar Hero series and sole creators of Rock Band, publicized the Wii’s lack of memory space for downloadable content in a recent interview with CVG:

“Come on Nintendo, we need a hard drive,” said Harmonix design director Rob Kay in an interview with CVG. “That’s what we want. The whole problem is there’s nowhere to store it. If the platform could do it, we’d jump on it. It’s something that we championed to Nintendo, that we’d like to do it.”

As a result, Rock Band for the Wii will not offer any DC, since there isn’t enough memory to do so.

In the age of digital media, it is tough to even fathom a half-way intelligent reason why the Wii was shipped with such low memory capacity. Frequent buyers of Virtual Console games have already noticed this, reporting that they can download a lot of older NES titles, but only a couple of N64 titles before they are out of memory.

IGN reported that Harmonix has sold more than $6 million in DC for the PS3 and Xbox 360 Rock Band versions. With that kind of money train coming in, it’s no wonder why Harmonix is critical of Nintendo’s lack of memory for the Wii.

How far will the Wii’s 512MB memory last when WiiWare is released to the American public? Sure, you can copy games over to an SD card, but you can’t play them from the card; forcing gamers to painstakingly cut and copy games every time they want to play a title that’s not currently on their Wii. It’s minuscule memory is especially laughable when compared to the current memory capabilities of the Xbox 360 and PS3, which range from 20 to 120GB. In this age of downloadable content (DLC), Nintendo’s decision to not include a larger harddrive seems like nothing more than sheer negligence.

Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime has promised Wii gamers exciting news at the upcoming E3. While this writer was initially hoping for a new Kid Icarus title, I would rather see announcements about my beloved console’s hard drive and a more user-friendly online feature, such as Xbox Live.

Share and Enjoy: