Shane: just watch and see Nintendo's online plan come together. It will never be like XBL... And the "hardcore" audience will probably always hate it... But Wii will pass DS to have the most successful online network among game machines, in terms of numbers of users and in terms of profitability. They'll have more users because the service is free and aimed at "casual" online play (sharing Miis, visiting friends cities, getting health feedback from hospitals), and VC will be many, many, many times more profitable than all the downloadable content on XBL. Those "casual" online elements I mentioned Nintendo is betting can be more important than what I like to call "splitscreen online." 95% of the time, MS and Sony are merely taking the existing kind of multiplayer we had, and putting it online. This is highly expensive, yet has absolutely no chance of expanding the market, but merely attacking each others userbase. The things Nintendo is doing, which games like Spore and LittleBigPlanet are also doing, is trying to create fundamentally different gameplay experiences through use of online. Only then can online become important in driving profits growth and userbase growth in the industry. And the VC is a stroke of genius. Nintendo have a system without an HDD (which keeps the cost low), which is going to quickly become the leader in downloadable content!!! Disallowing games to have added features prevents companies from trying to compete with each other to get the best enhanced games on the service, and in turn allows Nintendo to drive the library size sky high very quickly. Nintendo won't put other things up for download because its expensive, and they don't need to when they're profiting from everything else already. WoW is totally relevant when we're talking about online. When one game by itself is outpacing both of MSs consoles combined, and actually showing how an online-based model can be hugely profitable, its hard to think of MS as a big online leader.
"[Our former customers] are unable to find software which they WANT to play."
"The way to solve this problem lies in how to communicate what kind of games [they CAN play]."
Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President. Only slightly paraphrased.
