Console Funny Money Weakens Further
Last week, I was excited to hear about the opening of the new XBox Live Arcade Store on Amazon.com; console “funny money” (in this case, Microsoft Points) has been a constant annoyance this generation, mostly due to the fact that it complicates purchases which almost always leave you with an unusable balance in the end. Getting to buy software titles with actual money shouldn’t exactly be a novel concept.
It’s only been ten days, but Microsoft’s gumption caused the unthinkable to happen: Nintendo has decided to make WiiWare shopping far less irritating by beginning to offer these titles on Amazon.com (thanks to Gamasutra for the news tip). So far, the only one available is the amazing World of Goo, but the mere existence of this WiiWare game on Amazon.com could mean a lot for the future of Nintendo’s digital distribution.
If you’ve ever used Nintendo’s Shopping Channel, then you’d know it’s awful. Awful. Even when Virtual Console/WiiWare games catch my interest, I’m always a bit reluctant to log onto Nintendo’s poor excuse for a marketplace; it’s slow as hell, hard to search, and the downloading of seemingly small files takes much longer than it needs to. Nintendo may initially lose a few extra bones my making their software purchasable through Amazon.com–if you want to get World of Goo on the Shopping Channel, you’d have to buy 20 dollars’ worth of Wii Points for a 15 dollar game–but the intuitive nature and popularity of the famous online retailer suggests that they have a chance to sell the underpromoted WiiWare line of software to a much larger audience.
Now if only we could get them to offer demos…
Related Links:
The Problem With XBLA Pricing
For Indie Games, These are the Salad Days
The Best News In Sixteen Thousand Years: Cave Story Coming to WiiWare
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Tags: amazon, bob mackey, virtual console, wii, wiiware, world of goo
John Constantine, our superhero, was raised by birds and then attended Penn State University. He is currently working on a novel about a fictional city that exists only in his mind. John has an astonishingly extensive knowledge of Scientology. Ultimately he would like to learn how to effectively use his brain. He continues to keep Wu-Tang's secret to himself. 
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