Team Meat frustrated by WiiWare 40MB limit
Refenes reveals limits for 3DS eShop are a more reasonable 2GB, wants to publish on Wii U
Team Meat's Tommy Refenes has shared his frustrations over the strict 40MB limit Nintendo places on WiiWare, and revealed the 3DS eShop's limit stands at a more generous 2GB.
"[WiiWare's] 40MB is horrible, but [the 3DS eShop's] 2GB is reasonable," he said of the file size restrictions in an interview with Nintendo Gamer.
"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."
2GB is around the size of most retail games created for the handheld too.
Despite the problems the restrictions had caused the developer in the past, Refenes still wanted to develop for the new Nintendo platform.
"If we can in the future, we'd like our next game to be on Wii U as well as everything else."
Team Meat earned a reputation as outspoken after Refenes attacked Xbox Live Arcade at GDC last year.
It's kinda incoherent such enormous difference in size, but one must keep in mind that Wii's internal HD is very, very restrictive.
I don't know for sure, but 256MB for the 3DS seems a little small.. the MGS demo clocks in around this size, so it might be right.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Nicholas Pantazis on 27th February 2012 11:34pm
2GB would indeed be 1907MiB, and 256MB are 244MiB. 40MB are 38MiB, so assuming the "MB" above are consistent, there is indeed a huge gap.
My guess is that MB is being erroneously used instead of MiB, and some of you are getting confused with Mbits and Gbits. I guess only someone with direct experience could clarify the numbers, although I'm prone to think that the correct numbers are 40MiB, 2048MiB and 256MiB.
However, it is more plausible that the mix up is between bits and bytes. 2 GB and 2 Gb are a very big difference and are sadly interchangeable in written form by many people including those that should know better.
You are correct that you almost have to see the file size on your own computer just to ensure which unit prefix is actually being referred to.