Retro City Rampage dev: WiiWare version is ‘a $20,000 gift to the fans’

Indie developer Brian Provinciano of VBlank Entertainment recently stated that the WiiWare version of Retro City Rampage cost him a lot of money to release. Despite plenty of delays, however, the game landed on the Wii's download service, and while it certainly burned a hole in Provinciano's pocket, the dev is happy to have finally launched the game for the platform.

While a lot of folks currently own a Wii, the console's WiiWare service has truly faltered over the past several years, and purchasing games through the Wii Shop Channel isn't standard practice. As a result, games don't reach the prerequisite threshold for their devs to make a profit. Provinciano doesn't know if he'll make some money on the WiiWare iteration of Retro City Rampage, so for him, releasing the game was about keeping his promise and giving the fans exactly what he told them they'd get.

"Between the office rent, hardware, insurance, game ratings, and other costs, had I not done the WiiWare version, I could’ve saved around $20,000 — not even including my salary in porting it," stated Provinciano. "And as it stands, virtually no games hit the threshold these days, so it’s only being released as fan service. A $20,000 gift to the fans. However, I wanted to keep my word and didn’t want to see it go to waste."

[Nintendo Life]

Want to talk about indie games, Kirby, or cheap pizza? Follow me on Twitter @dr_davidsanchez.