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.

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Latest comments (7)

Adam Campbell Game Production Manager, Azoomee5 years ago

This has been a genuine complaint since the beginning of time... To think a home console could have such a limitation in the modern day is quite sad.

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Martyn Brown Managing Director, Insight For Hire5 years ago

Isn't the DS 2 gigabit (which is 256Mb) ? (40Mb is still pretty small, to be fair, in this day and age).

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Gregore Candalez Journalist and Account Manager, FD Com.5 years ago

Nintendo is too oldschool that they are still trapped in a day when games had 26kb of size.
It's kinda incoherent such enormous difference in size, but one must keep in mind that Wii's internal HD is very, very restrictive.

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Michael Shamgar Post-CEO, Nocturnal Entertainment Australia5 years ago

The WiiWare limit is based on a architectural limit, not some random decision from Nintendo: due to the nature of WiiWare titles, they need to fit entirely within (part) of memory. It has nothing to do with storage size.

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.

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Nicholas Pantazis Senior Editor, VGChartz Ltd5 years ago

@ Michael it's 2GB not 256MB. Not sure where you got that size from. The size is massive. No single downloadable game will ever even push that size limit on the sub-HD 3DS.

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Nicholas Pantazis on 27th February 2012 11:34pm

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gi biz ;,pgc.eu 5 years ago

Memory size units have been misused in all context to the point that we don't know what they possibly mean by 2GB until we see that on our computer (where we know the unit is wrong but at least it is consistent).
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.

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Jim Webb Executive Editor/Community Director, E-mpire Ltd. Co.5 years ago

Michele, that's possible. But the actual difference in data amount between 2 GB and 2 GiB isn't a whole lot. Either way, the gap between 40 MB/MiB and 2 GB/GiB is huge.

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.

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