Veteran developer David Braben, the mastermind behind the WiiWare's cracking LostWinds title, has admitted that the game may never have got made were it not for the distribution platform.

Braben was speaking at the Develop conference in Brighton yesterday, and enthused that services like "de-risk publishing".

"This is a game we probably wouldn't have done through normal publishing channels. It was a very difficult game to work out who's going to buy it, and so on. We just wrote this game for ourselves, and that's one of the reasons why we enjoyed the process so much."

Braben revealed that the title took 12 people just four months to create; the game starting life as a concept on Frontier's web forums.

The game maker is also full of praise for the latest releases, stating that quality and innovation has rocketed. "It's not just big innovation - small things too, like how user interfaces work. Think about how the way you find a group of people and get into a game in has changed. All of these things make a big."

Braben also believes that games were not better in the 'good old days'. So there.

By Luke Guttridge