Nintendo has announced that it has no plans to offer a Wii hard disk drive as the company believes that it is simply not needed by customers. The console currently has compatibility with old games that can be acquired via a special online store but a major issue is storage space, which is limited with the capacity of SD memory cards. Even though 2GB Secure Digital memory cards are hardly expensive nowadays, the necessity to buy a number of them to keep games playable when the Wii is offline may not seem as a comfortable option for many consumers.
“The way that we look at it is, we really don’t want people storing every single game they buy on their drive. When you buy a game, it’s yours forever, so you can delete it, and go back and get it at any time you want. In a way, we liken it 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,” said Nintendo public relations manager Eric Walter.
News source: Xbit Laboratories
“The way that we look at it is, we really don’t want people storing every single game they buy on their drive. When you buy a game, it’s yours forever, so you can delete it, and go back and get it at any time you want. In a way, we liken it 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,” said Nintendo public relations manager Eric Walter.
News source: Xbit Laboratories
Of the 512 Megs internal, you get around 300 megs or less to work with, which really limits things.
Having a 1 Gig or 2 Gig SD card plugged in offers a lot more storage, but as of right now, you can NOT run ANYTHING off of it.
Ehm no, that's why my iPod has 30 gigs of space so I can put ALL my music there and not have to bother with changing what I've got stored on it
So, I'll just keep them to myself thank you very much.
*looks for a 3rd party wii harddrive*
So, I'll just keep them to myself thank you very much.
*looks for a 3rd party wii harddrive*
Absolutely agree.
Being able to access extra content through the internet is great. Digital delivery - also great. But you shouldn't need to have the internet to be able to access these kinds of things, especially when storage is so very cheap. If the Wii continues to be massively popular and the back-catalogue of things available continues to grow steadily, and we start to see more and more users feeling the lack of space as they fill up their consoles (perhaps with things they really like to keep there) then Nintendo will reconsider.
tl;dr - I sure hope Nintendo will eventually change their mind on this. I really like the available back-catalogue of games. Some of them are real childhood gaming gems
I'd post the link but im @ work - detructoid is blocked
Alas, Nintendo's public relations is making the mistake of telling the consumer what they do, and how they should do it.
That really rubs me the wrong way.
Nintendo just needs to issue a firmware update to allow more functionality with SD cards and or USB drives.
Downloaded music tracks (Guitar Hero III are you listening Nintendo?), virtual console games, Wiiware, game patches, new levels, new game content, etc, could then be put on an SD Card and the Wii would sense the internal memory and SD card as one big piece of storage. Poof! Now you have over 2GB of storage (or more if you can use more that 2GB SD Cards).
Or
At the very least, they should allow downloaded music tracks and virtual console games to save right to an SD card (and be accessible) bypassing the internal memory.
Also, if Nintendo doesn't want a hard drive, allow third parties to develop one.
Nintendo needs to get on the ball and start listening to what the customer's want.
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.