Nintendo of America's Tom Prata has spoken at DICE of Nintendo's plans for the WiiWare and DSiWare services in 2009.

Tom Prata, senior director of Project Development at Nintendo of America, and Kyle Gabler (one half of 2D Boy, developers of the critically-acclaimed World of Goo), have spoken out at the DICE conference about the future of WiiWare, DSiWare, and the importance of indie games. "WiiWare is not magic and digital is not perfect... Digital cannot make mediocre great.", said Prata, following up that Nintendo is hard at work to fix any issues and improve the experience.

Prata continued and emphasised that, to him, the biggest issues with digital distribution are quality, reach, storage and promotion. Increasing the number of people who connect their consoles to the internet is a goal, as is storage, the bane of a lot of Wii owners. "We have not been deaf to the complaints", talking about the upcoming SD card-centric Wii storage solution, which Iwata also addressed at his DICE keynote.

On the subject of promotion, he says they're working, among other things, on improving web searches, and talked about a potential partnership with Gametrailers where players can submit their World of Goo videos for a contest. With PlayStation 3 users able to upload videos to Youtube directly from their games, this looks to be a step in the right direction for Nintendo towards making their online service a dominant force in the market.

Prata says that simply creating downloadable content, releasing it and subsequently "abandoning" it isn't the way to go. "You have to create the content, and then you have to raise it up. I think that there's more that Nintendo can do to support [WiiWare games]. This year, Nintendo will increase resources for development and promotion."

It was refreshing to see that Nintendo has great interest in what indie developers can offer and the benefits of digital distribution; "Here's how we see things today. Small is the new big." Prata labelled WiiWare as a developers' platform, not a Nintendo one, stating that 90% of its games are from indies and only 2 of the Top 20 games are from Nintendo.

An interesting keynote no doubt, and 2009 does indeed looks set to be a good year for Wii Ware, DSiWare and of course, smaller indie developers.