Olivier Langlois's blog

My opinion is that this will happen. You just have to take a look at Guitar Hero 3 sales that show that the game is best selling for the Wii. It does not take a MBA to figure out that releasing Rock Band on the Wii would be a profitable move for the publisher.

There are, however, few difficulties that need to be overcome before this happen. First, the publisher apparently is hoping to generate a lot of revenues from the sales of downloadable content for the game. With the new online connectivity of consoles, they are creating a platform that they control on top of the consoles. On the Wii, this is not possible yet to do that. Technically, it would be very easy for a game developer to write downloadable content on a SD card or on a USB hard disk but I am guessing that it is Nintendo that is stopping developers to do that for marketing reasons. That is certainly a factor that is slowing down Rock Band arrival on the Wii.

Secondly, Rock Band is using the network engine of my former employer, Quazal and Nintendo has a partnership with GameSpy, Quazal competitor. The exclusivity deal between Nintendo and Gamespy has the consequence of denying access to the Wii console to all the other 3rd party networking middleware providers. What that means for the publisher is that he will need to take a tough decision. Negotiate very hard with Nintendo to allow Quazal to port their middleware on the Wii. If this happens, it would be very beneficial for Quazal as Rock Band would become their entrance ticket to the Wii market. I am guessing that this option can be expensive as Nintendo is in position to negotiate as they do not need any hot title right now on the Wii to sell consoles and making tons of money. The other option is to port themselves the Rock Band game online connectivity module from Quazal API to GameSpy API. Based from my experience, I estimate that it could take a couple of months to a small team of software developers to do it.

No matter what outcome is chosen, there will be a lot of work to perform to do the port on the Wii. The chosen outcome will just move the burden to do the port of the networking module either on Quazal or on Harmonix. There will be no difference for the end-user so EA and Nintendo will opt for the option that is the most profitable for them. The decision will just make a big difference for my old buddies at Quazal so I hope for them that things will work out in their favor because they are working hard and have good products. Anyway, based on this explanation, I am predicting that if Rock Band makes it to the Wii, it will not happen before Thanksgiving 2008.