Plaupius said:
I don't disagree with you about it being nice if there indeed was a global friends list, and I believe (or at least I hope) it will come. But the concept of lower tiers and higher tiers does not have to do with how easy to use the online is, it has to do with how it relates to the consumers. And I suspect a good portion of those who are new to gaming are perfectly happy that they have a few games where they can test the waters, so to speak, the ability to play online with friends at all is new to them. Upstreaming is when they realize online gaming is fun, and wonder if not more games could support it, and perhaps if it would not be possible to have an easier way to control your friends and so on. We are already there, have been for years, and probably all of the younger IM generation is there also, but the older crowd might not be. Anyway, all this is speculation as we don't know what the real plans of Nintendo are. I just don't find it plausible that they would make this kind of "mistake" in a product that cost millions and millions to develop, and which by all accounts is designed extremely well around a vision of what it will be. There are just too many places in the design process where, if there would not have been compelling reasons to do it this way, somebody would have said: "Hey, let's have a global friend list." |
It is easy: They don't concentrated on that part, they don't expect the success. You can see that because the online servers of MKWii and Brawl are full and laggy at the high times. 50% of the sold wii in America are online, Reggie once said. Thats many. I am sure they didn't expect their online to be sooo sucessfull. They didn't expect their Online shop for games to be sooo successfull. Even nintendo now sees the problem with the disk space (they said it). They will find a solution. Why is so less space in a Wii (1 gig flash doesn't cost that much more than 512 mb, but would help a lot)?
Because Nintendo didn't see it comming. At the time the Wii launched their thought: 512 MB? More than enough! If they new how the system would get used, they would have put in more (how much would that cost? 1$, 2$? Nothing, I would say!)
It is the same with online. It is their first online system that get that heavy usage, and they truly didn't see that comming. Thats all, and thats fine ;) And I said the word "down market" and "up market" doesn't fit, I only said, if you have to put it in one of those two ;)
And where do you live that people up to the 40 doesn't know how a friendslist work? Or a phone book? They have it arround them all the time! Their mobile has a friendslist, their telephone, their email solution, their IM. At least in my country people in that age do now their way arround such things ;)
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