Nintendo Looking into Flash Memory Solution

via IGN


Nintendo's recent earnings report was full of great news for investors as the company's fortunes soared to record highs. But what does it all mean for gamers?

Company president Satoru Iwata provide some hints in a Q&A session following the company's press briefing last week. Today, Nintendo provided an English transcript of that session.

Iwata spoke at length on a number of issues, but one in particular caught our eye: the hot topic of the Wii's limited flash memory. Said Iwata, "Statistically speaking, it is true that there are a small number of customers who feel that the flash memory is too small, while many others find that they have plenty of memory. However, because this small number of people are none other than the most avid players, we know we have to review the best possible solution to eliminate their inconvenience."

So keep on complaining, Nintendo fanatics, and you may one day have full access to your virtual Wii games collection without having to delete stuff.

Iwata also gave some vague indication of the current performance of the WiiWare and Virtual Console download services. Total sales for the fiscal year for the two services combined came to 7.8 billion yen.

There's actually a fundamental difference between the WiiWare and Virtual Console businesses, Iwata explained. For the Virtual Console, Nintendo manages the full process of preparing software, even from 3rd parties. As it faces the business risks from distributing games on the service, it also takes a larger share of the profits. For WiiWare, 3rd parties face all the business risks themselves and handle marketing, and thus they get a larger portion of the profits.

For more of Iwata's comments, be sure and check out Nintendo's English transcript of the Iwata Q&A session for yourself.

Great news! Keep complaining people!

yeah, maybe we will get some kind of external space solution some day:)

how can they think 512(well its more like 470 because of some other system stuff) is enough, you get about 4 n64 games the other channels and some snes games and its fully, so much for the VC, no one wants to download the games over and over

I really don't like how he only believes that people with memory problems is small in population. Sure it's small in comparison to all the old people and family wiiers that buy it just for wii sports and wii fit, but there are still alot of people out there that want something done aboot this memory problem.

the Wii Internal Memory is DEFINITLY too small, i'm a big fan of Mario games so naturally, i have Super Mario Brothers 1, 2, 3, Lost Levels, Mario World, Mario Kart 64, Super Mario 64, and Paper Mario..all those definitly does NOT leave room for much more, I only have 4 Wii games and i'm STILL hittin the maximum Memory, i went and deleted Wii Vote Channel and couple more. I've deleted about 2 or 3 Virtual Console games as well. Why did Nintendo only put a 512MB Internal Memory in a console that as part of their selling point was designed to download game classics from the past?? Not only that, is the encrpytion REALLY that big on space? a NES ROM for an emulator is generally around 512k or less and a NES Virtual Console game is 12MB! why the 24x size!?