What is WiiWare? It’s this “revolutionary” concept of offering new titles and downloadable games on the Wii network which are not virtual titles of old legacy releases.

On Wednesday morning, Nintendo will officially announce to the general public its plans for WiiWare, downloadable games for the wildly popular Wii videogame console.

The focus seems to be on “shorter, original, more creative games from small teams with big ideas.” The most interesting part of the announcement was the mention of Indy game companies getting their chances on this hot selling console. They’re not limiting themselves to big publishers, looking to smaller companies to provide great games for the console.

Indy developers, as many know, do some great casual titles because they require less money and time to develop.

What’s more interesting is that Nintendo isn’t only seeking WiiWare from established publishers and developers like Ubisoft and Sega. At a Nintendo developer’s conference earlier this week, the company informed attendees that it was seeking from indie developers as well.

When? Not soon enough! The current estimate would be sometime “next year” before we’d see these titles pop up. Nintendo will set pricing and enforce a zero-tolerance for Adult-Only (AO) games, the developers and publishers would create the titles and get the appropriate rating from the ESRB. Nintendo would do some bug testing and compatibility testing but would not be overall responsible for “publishing” the downloadable content.

(Thanks, newsweek)