Tag Archives: Tom Prata

Nintendo of America’s senior director of product development, Tom Prata, revealed that according to Nintendo research, that the gaming market could grow as much as 50 percent.

Speaking at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, Prata stated that during the past two-and-a-half years, 30 million new gamers came into the fold in North America alone. This has brought the current player base to 143.7 million.

According to company research, the active market size of console and handheld gamers sits at 295 million and could grow by 150 million “if the right game came along.”

We’re just wondering which company will be the first to accomplish such a massive goal.

Via Edge, GoNintendo.

Nintendo of America’s senior director of project development, Tom Prata, has said in a lengthy interview with IGN that “currently, there are about 100 games in development for WiiWare at various stages of completion.”

Prata unfortunately didn’t have any download statistics to hand for WiiWare so far, and skirted the issue of Wii storage by saying, “Consumers have the option of either deleting the game and downloading it again for no additional Wii Points, or transferring the game from Wii to external SD memory card.”

Read the full interview through the link.

By Mike Bowden

This has to be the stupidest thing we’ve read from GDC so far. According to this, Nintendo has said that 100 games will be ready for WiiWare’s US launch on May 12, but will only be released a few at a time, in the same way as the Virtual Console Service.

So, Nintendo, what you’re saying is that you’re going to make a few games a week available on WiiWare, with a few available at launch. Glad we got that sorted out.

Other WiiWare information at that link says that not anyone can get games up on the service (dur) and an apparent confirmation that demos won’t be made available at all.