SNK boss: No third-party online for Wii until 2008

According to Ben Herman of SNK USA, third party developers will be restricted from including online capabilities in their games throughout the 2007 calendar year.

By Eugene Huang

A week or so ago, we reported that Nintendo plans on including NeoGeo games on the Japanese version of their Virtual Console service. Spong recently caught up with Ben Herman, head of SNK USA, to talk about the possibility of a similar arrangement for U.S. consoles, and he confirms that American Wii owners will also be able to download and play NeoGeo games sometime within the calendar year.

But Herman goes on to reveal some other interesting pieces of information in regards to Nintendo's VC service, such as the fact that Nintendo has all the games in the NES and SNES library safely hidden, ready to be accessed and released at any time.

"I know that Nintendo has all the code for NES and SNES titles, all of the manuals and so on," Herman claims. "They have a pretty good filing cabinet and all they have to do is seek permission from the IP holder to put the game out over Virtual Console, then share the income."

Seemingly, licensing issues may be the only obstacle in preventing Nintendo from releasing all of them at once, but the fear of oversaturating the market is also heavy on Nintendo's mind, according to Herman.

Also heavy on Nintendo's mind are recent concerns brought up by third party developers, who claim that that they still do not have the freedom to include online functions in their games. SNK is one such developer, and Herman believes that online features in third party Wii games won't become a reality until after 2007.

"[T]he best chance they have at building an online presence appears to be what they're doing with Virtual Console," he says.

These complaints seem to echo those recently vocalized by EA, but theirs have more to do with the current inability to implement Mii avatars into third-party games. According to a report from Next-Gen.biz, EA producer Eric Chartrand states that developers have not yet received the development tools necessary to include the usage of Miis in their games.

"If the company wants Miis to become a lasting sticky application," the report states, "it'd be wise to acclimatize third-party developers sooner rather than later."

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