Capcom to Make WiiWare Games….Eventually

In recent interview  with Gamasutra, Capcom’s Vice President of Strategic Planning and Business Development, Christian Svensson, made the exciting announcement that Capcom has future plans to bring new games to Nintendo’s upcoming WiiWare service. But not just yet. Capcom currently has a plethora of games coming out for Xbox Live and PSN and aren’t quite ready to start churning extra games for the Wii. Svensson explains it as such:

I’m going to lump WiiWare in with PSP e-distribution, in that we’re looking for the right content first — a lot of the content we have now isn’t quite right in value or approach or interface for WiiWare.

I fully expect us to be doing some WiiWare titles very shortly in the west. I won’t speak for Japan on that particular issue, but there are interesting things happening at some point there, maybe.

WiiWare has some interesting challenges in terms of interface. I shouldn’t say challenges: both challenges and benefits. The controls are different and frankly we’d like to make good use of the Wii Remote. We have a couple of concepts internally that I think would be perfect for Wii, as well as other platforms.

The other part of this is we’re trying to get a better handle on the online services that are going to be available to us on WiiWare. One of our hot buttons here across PC, PS3, and 360 is that we’re trying for feature parity across all platforms. That’s not a trivial task, especially when it comes down to user-created content.

Let’s say at some time we get into clan and guild support, or other aspects of user-created content propagation, that becomes a more interesting challenge on the Wii. Does that mean we couldn’t do WiiWare stuff that doesn’t have feature parity? Yeah, we could do that, but we have a couple of things where we might not have to cut anything. Let’s talk again next year about that.

Svensson’s thoughts on the challenges and benefits for WiiWare remind us that companies really need to think about what they are doing. I only wish he had gone a bit further and discussed what he really thought all the problems with WiiWare were. One of the most obvious problems so far is that no one really has a clue where WiiWare is currently going. If it’s in line with the rest of the Wii’s online services, it’ll be functional but not fantastic, which could definitely scare some of the big developers away. I’m guessing the biggest fear Capcom could have, like Svensson said, is that they won’t be able to do everything they want to with downloadable content on the Wii.

Many of us around here absolutely agree that time needs to be spent deciding what games to release for the Wii, but hasn’t Capcom already had a good chunk of time to prepare already? It would seem like the WiiWare service isn’t exactly coming out of the blue and surprising anyone. Either way, it’s good to see that they’re putting some thought into their WiiWare games, especially since Capcom has put out some of the best third-party titles for the Wii so far (Zack and Wiki, Okami, etc.).