Nintendo of Europe’s managing director Laurent Fischer has apologized for a comment he made about only “geeks and otaku” caring about the smallness of the Wii’s 512 megabyte storage space. That half-gig is all that Wii owners can save Virtual Console and new WiiWare games on.

So it’s kind of too bad he apologized, because I was going to explain why offering a storage expansion would make sense for Nintendo, aside from the snafu of calling your most enthusiastic customers obsessive shut-ins with smelly feet.

Well, what the heck. Let’s run with it anyway.

Fischer had a germ of a point. 512 megs isn’t much by modern computer standards, but consider what Wii owners can user them for. The downloadable N64 games come in around 32 megs, and the NES games are only 1 meg or so. The new LostWinds on WiiWare is not much bigger, coming in at 43 megs.

But whether or not the games are big or small, there’s only one reason why people would ask for more storage, and they are asking, make no mistake. It’s because they want to fill it with more stuff that they bought from you. There’s no other use for it.

If I may paraphrase Mr. Holkins of Penny Arcade, forget about selling a storage solution. Nintendo should be subsidizing the things! What’s the profit margin on selling a ROM image of a game that came out a decade ago? I’d wager it’s nearly the entire purchase price.

And besides that, a fair number of people in the industry seem convinced that downloadable content is the future. Hedging your bets against expanding your implementation of it seems shortsightedly cautious.

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