We’ve been clamoring for it for a while now (since the Wii’s release two years ago), and Nintendo’s finally given in – come Spring 2009 we’ll all be able to use our gratuitously sized SD cards that have been sitting in our Wiis to their full potential. You’ll be able to move your channels to the SD card and use them – including games purchased over the Shop Channel. I expect Nintendo will be taking measures to prevent you from simply giving your games to other people, or else there’ll be some mass game transferring between friendlies.
Supposedly there’s a 2GB limit to the storage you can use, and I’m currently not sure whether or not you need to buy a Wii-branded SD card (which would make sense given a limit). If so, expect this solution to take off more slowly than you’d have hoped – about as slowly as it takes for your wallet to fill up $80 in surplus cash.
UPDATE: As commenters are poiting out, the chances of Nintendo requiring a Wii-branded SD card are highly unlikely, as the Wii has supported all SD cards from the beginning, and there is no special format specifically for Wii (the only difference between SanDisk’s Wii SD cards is that they are white).
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October 2nd, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Why would you have to use Nintendo brand cards? You’ve never had to before so there’s no reason why one would have to now.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Companies like SanDisk make special cards “formatted for Wii” that come in limited sizes. While I’m not sure about the purpose of these, Nintendo could always be making a deal with SanDisk and other SD card manufacturers to include DRM elements on the disc if WiiWare and Virtual Console games are going to be transferred onto them.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:58 pm
An SD card is an SD card, there’s no such thing as “formatted for Wii”. The SanDisc ones that say Wii on them aren’t anything special, they’re just white. The limited size thing is to do with the way SD cards larger than 2GB are made in order to have greater storage capabilities. It isn’t Wii specific, my aging digital camera won’t take memory cards over 2GB either.
So it wouldn’t need DRM elements pre-installed on a SD card, it would just attach a small piece of data to each download, so it could only be read on the console it was downloaded to.
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Finally, we can store our channels. I was getting sick of delteing every game I bought off of the shop channel.