Not even in free to play? I think Blizzard have done it well in Hearthstone.

Yeah, they're prone to fuck up their HW, not so much with their SW. I agree that that specific DLC doesn't sound ll that good, but as I understand it Hyrule Warriors and Mario Kario 8 have done it VERY well.

If your last statement were true, shouldn't they have had paid online on Wii U? Hopefully, that'll NEVER change!

yes, I base this on absolutely nothing

Nope, wont ever happen.
The "Money" you can use to buy upgrades is earned by playing the game, and only by playing the game.

I've heard nothing but praise for MK8's DLC, but the reception to Hyrule Warriors' seems more mixed... but maybe the complainers are people who were too dumb to just buy the season pass, so I dunno. It did look like less of a money grab than your typical Warriors DLC to me. But it's always a ratchet effect with this kind of thing. Nintendo only fairly recently breached the paid DLC issue. A lot of Nintendo fans had previously been very vocal that paid DLC amounted to ripping out chunks of the game to sell it separately, so I think they're still treading rather carefully. Probably more importantly than that, Nintendo's own self image required them to put their best foot forward. However, once you cross that psychological barrier by doing something for the first time, it's always easier to do it again and you're invariably less thoughtful about how you do it. They did just recently take out the extra content from Fantasy Life Link for the western release in order to sell it separately, so while they're still far from Forza 5 territory I think the trend is definitely toward them maximizing revenue to whatever extent they think they can get away with it.

Same thing with paid online. After reading Dan Adelman's interview about how slow moving and clueless a lot of Nintendo's higher ups are I'm sure there are factions who would like to do it, but between those who are just extremely resistant to any sort of change and those who know that the Nintendo Network simply isn't competitive, it hasn't happened yet. But with every other company on the planet trying to figure out how to turn its product into a service and rope consumers into paying a subscription fee it only seems a matter of time before Nintendo shrugs and follows along, although with Nintendo being Nintendo that could be a very long time indeed. I think if they do ever do it, they'll pull a Sony and introduce it in such a way that it's tied to something like PS+ games to make it more palatable (again, as much to themselves as to customers).

Eww.

Just like they'd never do DLC right? They already did with Pokemon Shuffle which is basically Candy Crush. I don't expect them to do it in Splatoon, but saying that they'd never do it and that it's impossible is wrong.

Well, you do have to pay if you want to get champions other than the weekly free selection in LoL or play an insane amount of games to get IP and buy them. It's similar in Hearthstone you can get gold from playing a lot and completing quests, but it would take ages for you to have all the competitive cards without paying. I agree that LoL does it better though.

I think it will be in-game currency only for Splatoon, but in the future, who knows what Nintendo will do. Microtransactions aren't necessarily bad, as long as they don't make the game pay-to-win