WiiWare in "steep decline", according to Nicalis

Nicalis head Tyrone Rodriguez has announced that his company has cancelled the Western release of La-Mulana, citing development difficulties and the poor state of Nintendo's WiiWare userbase. Nigoro's action-adventure game La-Mulana came out in Japan last June, but in a statement to GoNintendo, Rodriguez explained why the Western release just never materialized.

"The decision to cancel publishing of La-Mulana was a tough call, but waiting two years for Nigoro to finish development has made it near impossible to sell sufficient units on Wii. The WiiWare market has a fraction of the players from 2008. The window for release and success of software on the platform ended in 2009 and took a very steep decline. Players have moved onto other digital download platforms," he said in his statement.

Nigoro had problems adding DLC to the title for the Western release, leading to the title's delay. Rodriguez later added more details on La-Mulana's troubled submissions process at Nintendo of America.

"La-Mulana was originally developed without DLC in mind and, I think being their first console project, that Nigoro got a bit ahead of themselves and spent two years agonizing on getting the DLC sort of working for Japan. Unfortunately, it never passed Nintendo's submission process in the US or EU with DLC in place. As the publisher, we're responsible for various things, but development (which includes programming, art, music and design) is and always has been in the hands of Nigoro."

"It didn't pass NOA, the first report from them came back with nearly two dozen issues, the second submission even more, etc." he said in a Twitter reply.