Developer Vicarious Visions has confirmed to Shacknews the Wii edition of Guitar Hero World Tour will support true downloadable content when it arrives this fall, allowing users to purchase and download new songs in addition to user-created tunes.

"There's downloadable content for the Wii, similar to what you'd expect, downloadable songs," Vicarious Visions CEO Karthik Bala told Shacknews last night. "The GH Tunes and the Music Studio [are a] separate feature."

When World Tour, commonly referred to as Guitar Hero 4, was announced last week, publisher Activision boasted that the Wii version supported downloadable content.

At the time, it was not clear if that applied to the delivery of post-release licensed tracks, as seen in Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 editions of the franchise, or if it merely referenced the sharing of World Tour's user-created songs.

Few Wii titles have supported downloadable content due to the system's paltry 512MB of internal storage. While that storage can be expanded with an SD Card, at present, the Wii will only execute downloaded content if it is located within that 512MB internal block.

When asked how Vicarious Visions resolved those storage concerns, Bala responded, "I can't talk about that today."

Harmonix, which created the Guitar Hero franchise before it was acquired by MTV Games, cited storage concerns as the reason Rock Band Wii does not support downloadable content. Instead, the company is providing additional Rock Band tracks to the Wii and PS2, which also lacks DLC support due to storage issues, via an expansion disc.

As for Activision subsidiary RedOctane's previous statements that it was looking into DLC support for the Wii edition of Guitar Hero 3, Bala noted that Vicarious was "actively working on it" but "we weren't sure about the timing."

"We've been looking at DLC on the Wii for a long time, and with Guitar Hero 3, it was the first Guitar Hero game on the Wii," he explained. "It was the first third-party WiFi title with online play. That took a lot of effort to be able to do that. We didn't have the time, and the infrastructure and stuff wasn't in place [at the time], for DLC [in GH3]."