S
ome of you may remember a recent announcement from Nintendo‘s CEO Satoru Iwata stating that users would not have to pay for Nintendo’s online services. Well, it looks like that may not be entirely true. While a lot of the Wii U‘s “ordinary services” will be free, users may have to pay for “deeper features”.
Iwata recently told shareholders, “We cannot promise that Nintendo will always provide you with online services free of charge no matter how deep the experiences are that it may provide. But at least we are not thinking of asking our consumers to pay money to just casually get access to our ordinary online services.”
Hmm. This is very vague, as I am sure you will agree, and doesn’t really clarify what a Wii U user will be expected to pay for and what may be a premium service. All we know is that it most likely won’t be a subscription service like Xbox Live, because as I said earlier he directly said otherwise.
“We have a wide variety of consumers, from the ones who enthusiastically play video games to those playing more casually, who are not always interested in them but try to play a game only when it has become a public topic or play it just during certain periods, like a year-end season and summer vacation,” he said.
“We therefore believe that services which ask our consumers to obtain paid memberships are not always the best.”
We will have to see what information comes out, but these two statements don’t really seem to gel. I am unsure of how they will implement this, but I am very curious to find out.
