Is Nintendo’s new downloadable games service set to be an Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network killer? We get the low-down on WiiWare from Frontier Developments’ David Braben, Telltale Games’ Dave Grossman and Mastiff’s Bill Swartz.

While the performance of Nintendo’s Wii Virtual Console has been “not bad”, according to company executive Shinji Hatano, raking in around $33 million from 7.8 million downloads by the end of November 2007, the company has long been accused of lagging behind the competition when it comes to its Wii online offerings.

That could be about to change with the launch of WiiWare. In contrast to the Virtual Console, which offers classic titles from systems of previous generations, WiiWare plays host to new, original games for download from small and large developers alike.

Nintendo has promised that WiiWare will reduce “the barriers that make console game development prohibitively expensive” and showcase “original ideas in the most democratic environment in industry history”, but will the service really free developers from the traditional constraints of videogame development? Will it soon be full of shovelware? Will game size limits and console memory restrictions put off developers? And just how committed really is Nintendo to online?

We asked Frontier founder David Braben, Telltale Games design director Dave Grossman and Bill Swartz, head woof at Mastiff, about their experiences developing WiiWare titles LostWinds, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People (SBCG4AP) and Major League Eating: The Game, respectively, and about their hopes for the service.

Did you approach Nintendo about making a WiiWare title or vice versa?

Braben: They came to us with the concept of WiiWare and we thought it was perfect [for LostWinds]. Then in a relatively quick time we put together the game. We had a lot of concept art which we showed Nintendo and I think to be fair we were both quite excited by it because we thought it would be fun.

moscallout“It was hard for us to get our phone calls returned until Sam and Max started coming out and [Nintendo] got very excited”/moscalloutGrossman: Ooh. That’s a good question. I think we approached them first a long time ago about doing something for the Wii. I think for a little while it was hard for us to get our phone calls returned until Sam and Max started coming out and they got very excited about it and then they started talking to us [about SBCG4AP, pictured below].

Swartz: Oh no, no. We went to them. It would have been nice if they had called us up and said ‘hey, we’ve got this great game, you should do it,’ but no, unfortunately we had to go to them.

Why did you choose to develop the game for WiiWare rather than Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network?

Braben: It was the way that you control the wind that was important and the control of the Wii was absolutely defined by that. We didn’t immediately think, ‘ah yes, it’s a WiiWare game,’ but we did think ‘oh, it’s a Wii game.’ There are games that use two Wii controls, where you have button combinations across the Wiimote and the Nunchuck, and that’s something that feels quite uncomfortable in my opinion. Then there are games that use the Wiimote purely as a pointer and don’t use the Nunchuck at all, but what we’re doing is subtly different in the sense that you’ve got one character controlled by the Wiimote, which is the wind, and the other where you’re directly controlling the character talking, and so it feels very natural to have the two controllers separated.

From a development point of view WiiWare is great. It means we can take bigger risks, we can experiment with new control mechanisms at less financial and commercial risk and I think that’s a fantastic thing.

Grossman: I do think that the Wii lends itself in particular to the kind of idea based gameplay that we do although ultimately I think we’d like it to be on all of the downloadable channels. The interface is meant to be very, very simple. You don’t need tons and tons of buttons but if you have something you can just point with that’s just great, so it was kind of an easier mindset for us to be on the Wii then perhaps on the other platforms, but obviously our games are meant to be simple and have a broad appeal and would probably be good on any of the downloadable channels.

moscallout“The last thing I wanted to do was try to be a mini EA or a mini Activision or a mini Ubisoft because we’d get creamed”/moscalloutSwartz: The Wiimote was the killer, period. Does Xbox have a Wiimote? Honestly, we wanted to do a Wii game, we wanted to do a WiiWare game, that was really very much in the front of our minds, and we wanted to do something with a license attached. Tony Hawk was already taken. No seriously, I really didn’t want to go out there and just make up some random sport by myself, you know, let’s do a Marble Madness rip-off because no one’s done one for six months. That was really what we didn’t want to do. We wanted to do something with a license attached but the last thing I wanted to do was try to be a mini EA or a mini Activision or a mini Ubisoft because we’d get creamed. So we were looking for a sort of minor but cool license that had some value that would let us use the controls in a unique way and ideally something that hadn’t been done before. No one has done an eating game - well, at least an eating game like ours, and it has the advantage because it is so hand to mouth and that is a really neat way to use a Wii control.