RB2 San Disk Debate Solved

So last week I brought the news about a San Disk that was made for Rock Band 2 on the Wii. Check it here. It raised some questions about the need to have it and if you had to actually buy this one to use it to get some great DLC for the Wii version of the game. Well after trying to track someone down at CES that knew the answers, I finally got them near the end of the show on Sunday. Yes 4 days of tracking for you guys. I hope you appreciate it.

That being explained, here are the finer details on this card. It is not proprietary in any way. In fact there is nothing special about it at all except for the packaging and logo on the card. Yes, that is all that there is about this card. Which may leave you asking yourself "why?" then about this.

After having a conversation with the technician behind the card, it was all for a marketing thing more than anything else. By that, they wanted to make it easy for a consumer to buy the right card for the game with great ease. You can use any card that will fit into the Wii for the purposes of downloading new content, but they were looking at the fact that not everyone out there is a gamer or a techy and may not know what to get if they wanted to buy a card to get DLC. Having the brand name on it allows for this ease. Here is his example.

"A parent goes to buy their kid Rock Band on the Wii. They want to get everything for the kid to spoil them and make sure they can get the most out the game. Instead of worrying or trying to find all the right stuff, they can just look and see that this card is the right one for the game. Much like how some BluRay films have 'Works for the PS3' stamped on the packaging. This way not everyone has to be tech savvy to make sure they are getting all they need."

Hearing this, it makes sense from a marketing stand point. But in the end, you can use any disk that will properly fit into the Wii. So you will not be required to buy this to enjoy the content if you have the Wii version of Rock Band.

On another interesting note, they apparently didn't even consider any form of protection for the card at all. The rep. made mention that was not a focus at all when Harmonix worked with them to get this disk out there. I then continued to question about how this will make it crazy easy for people to download content and then pass it around like candy online. But he didn't seem worried at all. In fact he even made mention that it would happen even if they did go the extra steps to protect the data. So it will only be a matter of time before torrent sites will have Rock Band DLC hosted for free download. We'll have to see how Harmonix will take that.

So, just to wrap up, if you need a disk for your Wii to download, this one is just the right card with the RB logo on it. You can use any card that has the same build to it that you may have or want to get. You will not be forced to own this if you want to download extras for the Wii.