Nintendo’s new, but relatively late WiiWare game distribution channel has a bit of a drawback for low.. make that really low-budget developers. Reggie Fils-Aime had this to say about development cost concerning the budget friendliness of developing through WiiWare:

All our SDKs and dev tools are already–I don’t want to call them inexpensive–they’re darn near free to developers. This is unlike our competitors, where you have to spend a lot of money building high-res assets to be competitive. So in that sense, there’s almost no cost to developers; the tools are already available at rock-bottom prices.

Unfortunately that “darn near free” price has an extra $2,500 US tagged on it because the games are required to go through the ESRB to receive a rating. Of course there is an obvious reason for this.

The developer is responsible for getting an ESRB rating for their game, just as with our current publisher agreements. We don’t allow AO-rated games on our systems.

We will be seeing the first games for WiiWare in 2008.
(Level Up)