Everyone's hoping for a Virtual Handheld or something similar. I fully expected it at launch until I thought about it for a bit. We won't hear anything officially confirming its' existence until some time next year at the earliest. DSiWare is still young and having trouble standing on its' own. It has some good games, but the platform truly hasn't been embraced worldwide yet. Only once it becomes a good spot for games can we ever have a Virtual Handheld or full DS game downloads. If they were to release now it would overshadow the original games made for the device.
Why would developers make a game specifically download only users when they could just make a DSi Enhanced game and release it on DSiWare? It'd be like the PSP's PSN. It's good, but is lacking in original content. Many of the full psp games have questionable prices and they're all over the place. It's not my intention to diss the PSP, but just to use it as an example. We should eventually get the service we want, but we're first being subjected to the service we never expected.
It worked in an opposite way for the Wii and it worked well. They released many dry games and a few quality ones through the VC, but when WiiWare released it had a good start and we're still getting good content from time to time. If something similar had of happened for the DSi, it would take much longer for hype of the old games and possibly original dS games to die down. DSiWare itself would never catch on or at least not when Nintendo wants it to do so. For a hand held device, it's critical to launch that type of service early. VH will extend the DSi's lifetime and give it a strong bang and further delay a real successor (not that one is needed, the DSi is hot).
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