The Quarter Bin

What happens when one of the most marketable consoles ever decides to weigh in on the digital distribution of comics? The world will soon know as Nintendo plans to team with a pachinko company to offer a WiiWare application for the digital distribution of manga in Japan. Hit the jump for more on this promising news.

Digital distribution is a tricky subject when it comes to comics. Personally, I like getting my comics at the shop, and I find it sometimes difficult to read a PDF of a comic. While Marvel has made the biggest push for legal distribution, you’ll find there are quite a few places to get up to date comics illegally. Now it appears the Wii is getting involved in digital comic distribution. IGN.com is reporting Nintendo will partner with Sun Denshi, one of the larger pachinko magnates in Japan, to bring original manga to Japanese Wii consoles.

The company will be forming a new Sunsoft Books brand for distributing content through the service. Wii owners will be able to view the digital comics using a viewer application that was developed internally at Sun.

One of the all-new mangas will be developed by Reifi Matsumoto, who gave space opera fans the Space Battleship Yamato series. While there’s no word yet of this WiiWare coming to America, the fact Nintendo is getting involved in legal comic distribution is huge. The Wii console is one of the highest selling anythings ever, and this is an interesting idea and partnership to say the least. Hopefully American publishers will be taking note of how successful this practice could be. Think about this: How many new readers would get interested if Marvel or DC put five or six downloadable issues onto a game based on one of their properties? This could have huge implications down the line if implemented well, and I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on how things progress from here.

What do you guys think?