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Free Wii online gaming.... Wii Wii Nintendo Freebee....;)
In an interview with USA Today, Nintendo bobo Reginald Fils-Aime stated that there will not be any subscription fee to online gaming with the Nintendo Wii. If this is in fact true the new console will have a big advantage over Xbox 360 live where online gaming is only possible for paying Gold-members which sets you back 50 bucks a year.
Fils-Aime stated that Nintendo doesn’t worry about the competition because a number of reasons: Nintendo is conviced the console will draw in a whole new crowd of gamers next to the solid Nintendo fan-base which probably will upgrade to the new machine anyways. The free-online-gaming experience will make the console even more desirable to the money conscious buyer whilst the price of the console is going to be a substantially lower than the competitors X360 and PS3.
The game-servers will be catered for by Nintendo when it comes to 1st party releases, third party game makers will have to cater for their own online servers. Nintendo believes that free-online gaming will stimulate the sale of hard- and software.
Comments
The way things look right now is that even though the Wii online services may be free, there's nothing that will prevent third party game developers requesting a subscription fee from subscribers. Nintendo is willing to invest to advance hardware sales, but third party developers may very well not be.
The online-experience provided by Nintendo might actually end up being less coherent than the X360's Live service which is maturing by the day. Even though it does cost an annual fee the X360 online experience is similar in all the games providing a cohesive and coherent experience which I think has a tremendous appeal. The Nintendo online experience might very well be vastly different from within each game (especially third party software) and the virtual console might end up being very limited in Europe / US because of liscensing. A lot of very nice retro-games haven't been translated and may very well never be.
-= Mark Vergeer - Armchair Arcade editor =-
I'm somewhat surprised that Xbox or Sony hasn't hit upon the idea of just giving you the console (or lending it to you) as long as pay a monthly fee. The system would work like the cable boxes. Obviously, there would be some logistical issues to address, but if it worked so well for cable (or digital sat for that matter), I don't see why it wouldn't work for a game console.
This is definitely interesting news. It seems like Nintendo is really betting the farm this generation. Did you hear that American McGee, creator of the famous "Alice" game, has said that the Wii is the only truly next-generation console? He calls the PS3 and the Xbox 360 "upgrades."
Matt, Cell phone companies did this for years - giving away a free phone to bind their customers. In the Netherlands those companies are shutting down those policies and require people to actually pay for the phone. Probably because in the long run it is just not profitable and only a marginally amount of extra people / consumers are gained and the companies end up loosing more money than they can earn.
-= Mark Vergeer - Armchair Arcade editor =-
While playing online games is fun, finding people to play with, meeting at a certain point in time and actually hosting or joning a game can be a hassle. While far from perfect, at least XBOX live provides the means to notify your friends, no matter what game they are playing, or notify them even if they are offline. This feature alone is worth some cash. Even on the PC, few games outside the MMO realm get this part right (Tribes 2 was a notable exception, but in that game you still had to rely on 3rd party Voice chat tools like Roger Wilco or TeamSpeak). So.. Wii online probably will be relatively cool, but not as cool as 360 online.
Gamertag: Custardo
Yeah, this is actually old news as it was known for some time that Nintendo's online "service" would be free, it's just that it's really official now. It is important to keep in mind that it's difficult to compare a free service to something like an Xbox Live unless it can come somewhat close to matching the feature-set. Yeah, it's about $50 a year for Xbox Live, but the cohesiveness of the network and the consistency of the online experience from game-to-game is tough to argue against. On Xbox and Xbox 360 - where you pay to play online and get the service - it's easy to do things online. On something like the PS2, which offers free online gaming, the experience is less than ideal, save for a few specific games that take it upon themselves to offer robust feature-sets. Still, for the most part, on PS2 you have to configure every game, which is rather annoying. If Nintendo sticks with the friends codes idea for the Wii, it will carry over one of the sticking points of online on the DS. In any case, the point is, free is great, but you almost always have to accept trade-offs. Let's also not forget that while you should be able to play games for free on the Wii, we still don't know the pricing around the virtual console offerings, which is REALLY the news we're waiting for...
EDIT: By the way, just to clarify in case my comments are misinterpreted, I was merely stating that this news that has been making the rounds is "old" in the sense that it's been pretty well established that it would be that way to this point. Nintendo was merely confirming it, making it official and adding a PR spin to the decision, which made it a news item, however minor. The comment was on Nintendo! It was in no way a commentary on us actually posting the item. Everything is fair game for discussion!
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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.
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