Super Meat Boy might ditch WiiWare, go retail

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Edmund McMillen, co-creator of Super Meat Boy. We talked about tons of stuff, most of which I can’t repeat. I can repeat this though, from Team Meat’s Twitter –“if we decided to try to find a publisher & do a boxed version for $20 (with extras) but come out later on the wii, would you hold out?“

Edmund asked me the same question. I told him that if there is any home console where a 2D platformer has a chance of succeeding at retail, it’s the Wii, as proven by Kirby’s Epic Yarn and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. That said, the Wii already has reputation for getting 3rd party games at retail that are just reverse-ports of $10-$20 XBLA/PSN games, such as NBA Jam and Dead Space Extraction. The Wii audience may see the $20 retail price tag for a game currently going for $10 on XBLA as an insult to their intelligence.

My idea was for Team Meat to break the WiiWare version up into $5 chapters, effectively tripling the 39MB file size restrictions of the WiiWare service, while retaining the $15 price tag. I’m sure that would be a programming nightmare though, but Edmund didn’t say that it was impossible.

What would you guys prefer? Should Team Meat stick to WiiWare, go episodic, venture into retail, or just ditch everything for a kick-ass 3DS port?

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Edmund McMillen, co-creator of Super Meat Boy. We talked about tons of stuff, most of which I can’t repeat. I can repeat this though, from Team Meat’s Twitter –“if we decided to try to find a publisher & do a boxed version for $20 (with extras) but come out later on the wii, would you hold out?“

Edmund asked me the same question. I told him that if there is any home console where a 2D platformer has a chance of succeeding at retail, it’s the Wii, as proven by Kirby’s Epic Yarn and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. That said, the Wii already has reputation for getting 3rd party games at retail that are just reverse-ports of $10-$20 XBLA/PSN games, such as NBA Jam and Dead Space Extraction. The Wii audience may see the $20 retail price tag for a game currently going for $10 on XBLA as an insult to their intelligence.

My idea was for Team Meat to break the WiiWare version up into $5 chapters, effectively tripling the 39MB file size restrictions of the WiiWare service, while retaining the $15 price tag. I’m sure that would be a programming nightmare though, but Edmund didn’t say that it was impossible.

What would you guys prefer? Should Team Meat stick to WiiWare, go episodic, venture into retail, or just ditch everything for a kick-ass 3DS port?