[mikepurvis]

The Wii was a bit of a special case for how incredibly janky it was to be trying to present a system shell without it being actually backed by a proper OS/hypervisor arrangement like the other platforms of its generation. That it was able to do paid digital games at all is kind of miraculous.

[selfhoster11]

The Wii was designed with digital content delivery from the very start, from what I know.

The NAND was only 512 MB, but it was easily expanded with a memory card for downloads. The security model worked somewhat well, with jailbroken consumers having to keep an eye out for Nintendo's retaliation during the active part of the console's life. While it didn't have a hypervisor (well, it sort of did - if you squint just right, the ARM processor was a hardware bus access arbitrator that would lock you out if you were accessing things you weren't privileged enough to access), it definitely did have an OS - multiple concurrently installed copies, in fact.

IMO, there is nothing miraculous about Wii's ability to support paid digital games. We don't find it miraculous when a hypervisor-less PC can run games purchased off Steam that were downloaded to an external USB drive. Why should we think it's miraculous when a games console does something nearly identical?

[chrisco255]

I dunno, miraculous in 1986 maybe, but in 2006?

[mikepurvis]

Sure, it was reasonable for the time given that XBLA launched two years before the Wii.

The issue was that the Wii was basically just a GameCube++ in terms of architecture, and no one would have expected a digital storefront on a platform where all the software boots bare metal.