WiiWare is a lot like the Xbox Live Arcade. You download games that aren't very big, but they're still full games. Most of them are about as big and content heavy as games used to be 10 - 15 years ago.

My Life as King is the most expensive WiiWare title announced, at 1500 points, or about $15 US, as opposed to 500 - 1000 points. Most WiiWare games are cheap because they don't cost very much to develop. It wouldn't make sense to invest a lot of money in distributing them via physical means like a DVD ROM, especially since they're so small.

One of the best things about digital distribution of these small games is that it's so cheap and the savings are passed on to the consumer. However, Squenix doesn't seem to understand that, as evidenced by the relatively high price of the game, and further evidenced by the amount of downloadable content available for it. You only start off with the Clavat race, and you actually have to buy the other races seperately. So far, the cost of the game and the first wave of DLC is something like $30, and there's more on the way. In the end, if you want to buy the whole game and all of the "extras" that should have been included in the first place, it's going to end up costing more than the price of a standard disc-based game.

So far, this seems to be the only WiiWare game taking this route, as the rest of the WiiWare titles released in Japan or announced for any other region have stuck to the base price of 500 - 1000 points, without any extra gouging. Everything but My Life as King is using WiiWare for what it was meant for.