Nintendo took some flack this past generation for not offering a comparable online solution to Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata says, however, that the Wii U will have a flexible online system.
“Nintendo’s past console business has often included this idea of a set and fixed online structure,” said Iwata. “So, I think that, going forward, the question is really to what degree Nintendo can create a more flexible system for its consoles. And, what we found at this point is that, as we discuss the online structure with different publishers, the things that the different publishers want to do are in fact seemingly rather different. Our current direction is how we can take the desires of the third parties and create a system that’s flexible enough to enable them to do the types of things that they might want to do. But, what we’re not going to do is to consider as prerequisite conditions that every game includes features like that because obviously there are some developers who may not want to do that.”
Despite being down on social networking in the past, Iwata says he’s considering such integration now. “We’ve come to an era where it’s important to consider how the social graph of the social networking services can work in conjunction with something like a video game platform.”
“Once you hear what we’ll have to say, you’ll feel that Nintendo has a policy of adapting itself to changes in the network environment in a flexible fashion rather than the one of sticking to a rigid mechanism, or perhaps you’ll notice that we have found ways to take advantage of these types of features like VoIP and social networking, where our systems have been seen as being weak in the past, added Iwata.
Source: nintendo.co.jp