WiiWare certification ‘took 9 months’

Canada indie studio Beamdog wrestled with Nintendo’s certification process for nine months on a single game, a director at the company has said.

Beamdog executive Trent Oster said the whole experience, which was allegedly marred by other problems, had burnt bridges between the two companies.

“We don’t do Nintendo development,” Oster said in a message on Twitter.

“Our previous experience with Nintendo was enough to ensure there will not be another.”

Oster then proceeded to detail other flaws he believes Nintendo is guilty of, such as developers “requiring 6,000 unit sales before payment”.

He also criticised Nintendo’s alleged 40MB file size limit.

It appears that Oster’s opinion was drawn from his studio’s work on the Wii edition of MDK2 HD.

Nintendo itself has admitted that the performance of WiiWare has not been entirely satisfactory. It now claims the Wii U will rectify previous issues.

Last year it emerged that the developers of the WiiWare edition of Lilt Line would not receive any money unless sales doubled – again due to the arbitrary minimum sales threshold.

Months earlier, the duo behind the indie breakthrough Super Meat Boy cancelled a planned WiiWare version of the game due to Nintendo’s file-size limits.

Oster today said on his Twitter feed that such problems lead to the belief that “Nintendo isn’t a good platform for developers. The Wii is a toy, not a console. The reason I say the Wii is a toy is the exceptionally low attach rate. You buy a Wii, Wii Sports and never buy another game. Bad for devs.”

He went on to praise other platforms and games released by the company.