Kotaku
When we heard that Rock Band was coming to the Wii without DLC, we'd long since anticipated the problem, our psychic powers stemming from the Wii's obvious lack of decently proportioned internal hard drive. Now Harmonix's design director Rob Kay has confirmed that the Wii's lack of storage was indeed the reason Rock Band Wii will not have DLC:
Come on Nintendo, we need a hard drive.He continued:
That's what we want. The whole problem is there's nowhere to store [DLC]...If the platform could do it, we'd jump on it.But the Wii isn't a completely closed system. It can accept SD cards, a cheap form of media storage that Hamonix seems to be overlooking.
Sure, they couldn't depend on everyone to be able to download multitudes of tracks, but I'm betting that those shilling out big bucks for Rock Band wouldn't mind investing in a larger SD card—one that wouldn't cost much more than a Wii hard drive anyway (and could be packaged with the game). Or as an alternative, small SD cards could be sold in brick and morter stores with large track packs and whole albums. It's under $5 to buy an SD card for the average consumer, so imagine how low the prices become in bulk.
That said, come on Nintendo. Harmonix says they need a hard drive so please make it happen.
"Come on Nintendo, we need a hard drive," says Rock Band dev [CVG]
Comments
Too late, what Wii game offers updates by patch? Harmonix would have to remake/re-release the game on Wii in order for it to be online enabled. Seeing as how Rock Band Wii is coming out in a few weeks, I highly doubt Wii will ever get DLC for this title.
You wouldn't be able to use the songs on the SD card until you transferred them over. It would be a pain.
Can't we all just get along? You! Make the HDD and YOU! Make DLC and not a gimped version! Thank you... =0D
At least a 10 gig? Not too much for it? =P
i bet the reason they want the hard drive isn't so much storage space as it is drm protection. they don't want people to easily transfer over DLC, which might be easy to do with the SD card.
they won't listen. nintendo always does their own thing, it comes back to bite them in the ass about as much as it works for them.
see: Gamecube.
If I hear this SD card argument one more time...
Just because of Nintendo, I am going to refuse to ever buy an SD card for the rest of my life. Just because they think it's a viable solution to not putting decent space on their system.
I love buying VC games but I can't anymore because I've run out of space. No, the SD card or re-downloading arguments don't hold up. I'm not going to do that. The solution is to not buy more VC games and therefore Nintendo just screwed themselves out of free money.
Whose brilliant idea was it to release a system whose internal memory is the same size as their competitor's onboard RAM?
I agree with your last comments and it's something I have been saying.Packaged SD cards with music on them already could be a viable alternative.
Please oh please, Nintendo just buy a cheap 10 gb hard drive and slap a official Nintendo logo on it and sell for 3 times the usually price. It's not that different from the SD cards right now.
@munchausen: You can do that NOW with the ps3. You just log into another PSN account and download the songs they've already payed for. My friends and I buy different song packs and just combine our collections.
Good luck on that one Harmonix. Even if it does get made by Nintendo the attach rate will be miserably low with out a doubt. Not that it is not a good idea, it is just not practical.
Yeah, good luck with that Harmonix.
If they wont give us a Hard Drive Nintendo needs to use the SD slot more. I want to be able to run VC games from it and white saves to it considering 512Mb internal gets pretty crowded fast.
too bad. maybe they should just use a portable cartige-drive.
A 4gb SD card is like... Dirt cheap. And should be able to hold a few tracks, I don't know how big they are.
Is the max size for an SD card still 2gig? And can we run files off of it (not pictures and the like, i'm talking VC games and saved files)
What's their excuse for not having online?
The Wii could use any commercially-available USB external HDD, couldn't it?
@Yin: They're about 30mb each, gives or take. Although if there were somehow DLC on the Wii version of Rock Band I'd guess they'd make them much lower quality so that maybe you could fit more than 4 songs on the console.
This is what we were waiting for, glad it was Harmonix who finally said it.
I just got a 16 GB card (nearly as much storage as the first PS3 had) for $75. 8GB will run you around $30. Don't really see an argument against SD unless somehow the system isn't able to access it the way that Harmonix needs it to.
@Seruza: aha, but then with the PS3 there are still some limits, right? like you can only download it three times or something like that? if it could be lifted off an SD card, then you could easily distribute it on the internet, which kills the whole DLC distribution model. also, if Sony wanted to, they could enforce controls on that and kill the PSN account-- it is clearly against the PSN agreement; but, of course, as far as I have heard they have not enforced the download work-around or the regional downloading; both of which could void your account and potentially forever make your PS3 non-network enabled.
@chords of steel:
Probably the inability to patch games after release
@weatherman: Just an update away!
A 3 song pack is like 75 MiB. One could fit so many songs on a one GiB SD card and sell it for alot of money. Harmonix would only need to bind the content to wii friend code or something.
Yea, let's throw a 73GB Solid State Disk in there. That fits.
@weatherman: Thing is the wii can only run Regular SD cards, in the 2 gig max flavor. SDHC is not supported.
@munchausen: no, no limit, you or any of your 4 friends who know your sign-in info can redownload the songs as much as you guys want to.
Given the Wii has two USB ports, an external HD couldn't be that hard to incorporate.
Harmonix, why don't you actually focus on not giving gimped PS2 version for the Wii and find a way to read the data off of the SD cards.
Yes, the Wii needs a HDD. That is still no excuse for the piece of shit that you are porting to the Wii. You could have put the effort into finding out how to use the SD cards. You chose not to. You could have put online on there. You also could ahve included all of the modes. You didn't. Why? Because you are just making a cheap cash in.
So, don't act like you are trying to do any Wii owners a favor. You are attempting to rip them off.
@weatherman: I was under the impression the Wii can only access 2gb cards, but I'm probably mistaken. Doesn't matter how much it can though because you have to transfer it to the internal card for it to be able to be read by games.
@exolstice:
So why can excite truck load songs directly from the SD card?
If you don't know about what Wii can do don't guess.
@KirbyMorph: No you don't. There a a few games that read information off of the SD cards just fine.
@DigiMish:
ouch for harmonix. that has to hurt their bottom line. i'm surprised they didn't try to be more restrictive.
The lack of HDD is a side note, at best. RB Wii is a port of the PS2 RB, which does not offer real-time rendered avatars, instead storing FMV versions of all the songs, unlike the 360 and PS3 versions. As this is the case, even with a huge hard drive, RB Wii wouldn't have 360/PS3-style DLC.
Wii HDD? Do want please :( I'm sure Activistion could've used the HDD to fix the GH3 issues, maybe, but when looking to the future, the Wii is definitely going to need a HDD (unless affordable 20-100GB SD cards become available at some point).
I wonder if you can't download stuff directly to the sd slot. I don't know why you wouldn't be able too, but Nintendo does have a knack for making arbitrary restrictions.
The Wii version of Rock Band is essentially the PS2 version of Rock Band.
@emag: If this is true, serious negative respect for Harmonix on this one.
They expect us to believe the Wii can't handle rendering 4 people walking around on screen with some flashing lights and stuff once in a while? Bull. Shit.
Imagine if the Wii didn't have some of the major flaws it does (lack of HD, online suckage)
it could of actually been more successful!
@DigiMish:
No, it's limited. I think the limit is for the number of PS3s you can download it to though (which I believe is 5), not the number of times you can download it. So unless you have more than 5 friends with PS3s that are all using that same content, you shouldn't be having any trouble.
As for the matter at hand, from what I understand you can't execute game data from an SD card. You can access music for custom soundtracks ie Excite Truck but the Rock Band sogns are not MP3s, they're game data. So yeah, they need a hard drive especially with Wiiware on the way.
With over 6 million songs bought on the X360 and PS3, do you really think Harmonix or EA really want to neglect the gi-normous Wii userbase just to be lazy? I don't fucking think so.
512MB of onboard storage and up to 4GB of offboard swapable storage...
Is it ideal? No. Does it in any way prevent them from doing DLC? No. 512MB is enough space to store several DLC downloads, and the 4GB you can get in an SD card is enough for many.
I find Nintendo infinitely frustrating in many of the ways they handle business, but this? Come on. A huge SD card costs about as much as we payed for standard memory cards last gen. That's a really stupid excuse.
Hell, SD cards are even far more ubiquitous than proprietary memory cards could have ever been. I'm sure you could probably find one at Publix.
EU to Harmonix: We need a pricecut!
@guspaz: Think of it this way: when and if Harmonix finally release albums. Not even an entire album would fit in the Wii's internal memory even if it's completely empty before you download it. (Which is of course, impossible because you'd have to at least have the Rock Band save data on there. And who doesn't have SSBB? That game along takes up like a third of the Wii's storage, just for it's save file.)
Yeah good luck with that Harmonix. Be careful what you wish for. Nintendo fans wished for access to the back catalogue and online play, and instead we got the VC and that mess they're trying to convince me is "online."
just...be careful what you wish for...
Also about USB. Why doesn't Harmonix just make more PS3 and Xbox instruments instead of making a new one for the Wii? The Wii has USB, all it needs is that adaptor and we're set. What? Too much USB is bad for the Wii?
@exolstice:
You're making stuff up, stop it. SSBB can play custom stages stored on the SD card without copying them over. Excite Truck can play MP3s stored on the SD card without copying them over.
I hate when people are misinformed.
After the Wii I am unsure if I will ever buy a nintendo console. They just keep screwing themselves and their users over.
The SD card slot argument is a bit redundant considering you have to transfer all the content on it back to the onboard memory before you can use it. I know people above have probably already stated this but its silly and i'm going to love to know how Wiiware is going to cope. Yeah, SD cards would be the most logical storage option for Wii but whats the point of buying a big capacity SD card when you need to constantly swap the content stored on it back and fourth between your Wii? Honestly the Wii was very poorly thought of. I'm sure a firmware/update could solve this problem but does anyone actually expect Nintendo to ever do it? I don't.
The Wii version is a PS2 port anyway, so the songs shouldn't take as much space as the 360/PS3 ones.. a 1gb SD card should be more than enough for that!
Game developers today are too lazy.. The NES had 64K of memory and the developers did wonderful stuff with it!
Dear nintendo:
i would also like an easy way to back up my VC games onto my SD card, instead of looking at the contents of internal and SD memory and trying to figure out what I have backed up and what I haven't.
If anyone has done this backup, they'll note that backing up anything of a substantial size to the SD card takes *forever*. Wouldn't it be fun to wait 30 seconds while you wait for your DLC to load into RAM. Let's get ready to............ ................ ............... .............. .............ROCK!
@Seruza: Smart jackass, declare how your screwing over Sony by telling everyone about how you exploit a flaw in there system, then when they fix it in a patch you'll probably be one of the people crying about how you actually have to BUY all the songs you want from now on.
@sugardeath: QFT.
But, if you have a copy of ExciteTruck and an SD card, can you make a single 100M mp3 (like a whole album as a single track at 320kbps) and confirm that ExciteTruck will play the whole thing? I lack the former for this experiment.
@Tiberian: As others have noted, plenty of games, most notably Excite Truck and SSBB, are able to read data from the SD card in-game.
This is the ONE issue with the Wii that I think most/all of us can agree on, Wii afficianados and haters alike. It needs more storage, and it needs it post haste. How that is accomplished is not even that important, but yeah, it needs to happen.
Probably won't happen, unfortunately, Nintendo doesn't think its that important apparently ;)
@ holy_cow:
you forgot to mention the the wii verson $10 more.
Simple HARMONIX make the DLC STEREO only and it will be able to fit in the SD, anyway stereo sounds its just fine...
It would go a long way if Nintendo just let us use any 'ol USB hard drive.
I forgot, that there are already USB flash drives of 8gb for $50 or less, and the wii has 2 USB 2.0, so please nintendo make that d@mn update and enable the USBs on the wii...
@Guitaratomik: yea, that's what I said, you must have misunderstood me. The download data can be shared infinitely between 5 sign-ins (yours being one of them). Once your fourth friend activates your sign in on his PS3 machine, you can't share with any more people unless one of your friends deactivates your account on their PS3 machine.