Nintendo has said that online services mightn’t always be free on the Wii U.
“Ordinary” online services will apparently always be free, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has stated.
“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,” Iwata stated during a company shareholders meeting.
“But at least we are not thinking of asking our consumers to pay money to just casually get access to our ordinary online services.”
Iwata’s opinion is that casual gamers aren’t keen on having to pay a subscription for online services such as Xbox Live.
“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.
“We therefore believe that services which ask our consumers to obtain paid memberships are not always the best.”
Wii U will be using the Nintendo Network online service that’s already in place for use with 3DS games. New to the Wii U, however, is the Miiverse, software built to bring social network elements to the Wii U dashboard.
