Nintendo Encouraging Small Developers on the Revolution ?

We already gave you a pretty detailed play-by-play of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata's GDC keynote yesterday, but there was one very interesting point we want to point out. While Iwata mentioned it only as a passing afterthought, the press release that hit the wire during his speech noted that "new forms of innovative software that can be created by any size developer will be made available for download via Revolution's Virtual Console service." This kind of service bears more than a glancing similarity to the Xbox Live Marketplace, whose staple title Geometry Wars has proven to be one of the biggest reasons to own an Xbox 360 (and we mean that as a compliment--the game rocks).

The ability to download original content, at least on par with the Xbox Live Marketplace, is key to Nintendo's online success--especially content that utilizes the Rev-mote in unique and creative ways. The only issue we see is the Revolution's rather small internal hard drive (512MB of internal flash with an expansion bay for SD cards, according to the the current specifications). We feel that downloadble original content, alongside the purportedly low development costs associated with the Revolution, will drive more risk-taking independent developers to Nintendo's console.

AS they should. Nintendo, good work!