3DS eShop games can be fifty times larger than WiiWare titles

A giant discrepancy has been revealed between the maximum eShop file size of WiiWare games (50MB), and games for the 3DS (2GB).

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WiiWare games are only allowed to be up to 40MB in size, a limitation that has prevented many games from appearing on the service, notably Super Meat Boy, which struggled to fit under Nintendo's strict guidelines. The ceiling has been raised quite considerably for Nintendo's latest system, however. 3DS games are given fifty times the virtual real-estate, topping out at 2GB.

Super Meat Boy developer Tommy Refenes told Nintendo Gamer (via Nintendo Everything) that "Super Meat Boy would have been on WiiWare if we could have had just a few more megabytes of space - you can only compress stuff so much before you have to start cutting out huge parts of your game. Unfortunately, at that point, it just isn't worth the time."

In the interview, Refenes described WiiWare's 40MB limitation as "horrible," but called the 2GB afforded on the eShop "reasonable." Team Meat has been exploring a 3DS release for The Binding of Isaac, a game that would easily fit the 2GB limit.

Because most 3DS cartridges store up to 2GB, most 3DS titles will be able to be served as digital downloads, should Nintendo decide to make them available via the Nintendo Network.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    February 27, 2012 9:49 AM

    Jeff Mattas posted a new article, 3DS eShop games can be fifty times larger than WiiWare titles.

    A giant discrepancy has been revealed between the maximum eShop file size of WiiWare games (50MB), and games for the 3DS (2GB).

    • reply
      February 27, 2012 9:59 AM

      Does the 3ds have propietary storage like the Vita?

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        February 27, 2012 10:00 AM

        2GB internal flash and SD cards for additional capacity. I think only 1.5GB of the internal flash can be used though.

    • reply
      February 27, 2012 10:00 AM

      Yeah, that's what happens when you cheap out on internal storage. Interesting that they haven't increased that for the Wii since launch though, given that it can include just about any size SD card now.

      • reply
        February 27, 2012 3:19 PM

        I'd guess that the bottleneck is in the limitations that are inherent to the console. Even though you can have sdhc cards up to 32gb recognized by the Wii console, the wii loads the game or program from the sd card to a cache file on the 512mb internal memory. So even if you have the sd card you can't load anything from it unless you have the required space available on the system memory.

        As for the reason they never expanded on board flash, they must have thought that only power users of the system were going to fill up the memory so it wouldn't be worth the added cost per unit to put more in it. And for the most part, they were absolutely correct.

        I don't think Wii U is going to have the same problem because they said you'd be able to hook up external hard drives to it for expanded storage.

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