Nintendo has unveiled details of its new Wii Software (WiiWare in the U.S) downloadable games program, giving fans access to new and original titles sometime early next year.

The Wii Software titles will be downloadable from the Wii Shop Channel for fans with Wii Points. At the moment fans can download Virtual Console games but the WiiWare games will be original and developed especially for the Wii.

"Wii Software provides developers with big ideas - rather than big budgets - an easy and very accessible way to create new games and bring them to the marketplace," European marketing director Laurent Fischer said.

Newsweek reported that visitors to a developers' conference earlier this week were told that games are being sourced from both big companies such as Ubisoft and smaller independent publishers.

Although Nintendo has control over such details as cost, it won’t be deciding things such as ratings which the publishers will have to do. It has stated, however, that it won’t post games with an AO rating.