During a closed door session at GDC, Nintendo Network Administration Group Manager Takashi Aoyama discussed some details on WiiWare. The great thing about GDC is you can catch some nice candid moments with the developers. After all this is supposed to be their show, and the influx of media and bloggers is perhaps doing more harm than good. But in any case, Aoyama was able to discuss some of the details we have yet to hear about WiiWare.

According to Gamasutra the service is the natural progression of Virtual Console, and is also an answer to the commercial software model currently in use. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata views digital distribution as far more flexible model of distribution. Which it is, and it’s nice to hear Nintendo get behind the trend. The problem is how will we get our WiiWare titles and store them. Aoyama talked about a new compression scheme that will store games as tiny files, and then when you launch to play they’ll blow up to normal size. That still leaves little space for games on the tiny internal memory of the Wii. SD cards are said to be the answer, but if so we need to read games directly off of them. Rather than the cumbersome transfer of a file that occurs now.

To save space all game manuals will be hosted online and viewable before you purchase a game in the Wii Shop Channel. As soon as we hear more, we’ll pass it along.