Let's be honest with ourselves, Miyamoto could have just said "Fuck online" and people here would have been just as happy with his answer.

So now he's saying what he probably should have said from the beginning, that they *could* have done it, but their priority was crafting a local multiplayer experience

ONM: Was online multiplayer considered for the game at all? Was it just too difficult to get it to work without any lag?

SM: Well, it's not for purely technological issues that it wasn't included. After all, as you know, we already have online play in Smash Bros., and technologically speaking, I don't think it's creating a high amount of lag. It's just a matter of our priorities when it comes to the creation of a game. We just prioritised on making a multiplayer mode where four players can sit together and play while seeing each other's faces.

We thought that this was more important as far as this New Super Mario Bros. was concerned, but we don't know about the future. Because network environments are getting better and better every day, it may be possible in a future edition to incorporate that type of multiplayer online mode for a real-time action game. But I am just talking about the technological aspect here. What's more important, of course, is if it's going to add to the fun aspect of the game.

This explanation seems like the most appropriate, though that statement about Brawl not generating a lot of lag has to be a poor translation, or he has really never tried it...

Full interview here: http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk/article.php?id=14117

Wrong, stof. Having no online play will sell more systems. This way people have to expose the game to friends. 2D Mario has so damn much selling power that it alone is worth it for people to buy a console for.

Including online multiplayer would have pushed the release of the game back. I know I would be pissed, if that happened for something that I couldn't care less for.

On top of that the sales charts on all home consoles show that local multiplayer is higher valued than online multiplayer. Yes, even on the 360 and PS3, because to my knowledge the Halo and Modern Warfare games do have splitscreen multiplayer. And then people wonder why Killzone 2 didn't sell any better, even though it was such a damn awesome game.

I know that there are people who want all games to have online functionality. I know that there are people who want stories in platformers. I know that there are people who want every game to use the latest technology. But I also know that all those people are a clear minority and as long as this is the case, they shouldn't wonder why they are ignored. And as long as the vast majority of consumers is very happy about the final product, you can't call leaving out completely non-essential features "inexcusable".

Do you have any evidence for that, like the number of people who play offline multiplayer? Well, of course you don't have it.

Maybe it's better to ask why those best selling franchises became such. We know for sure that Halo made its name entirely through local multiplayer and I am pretty certain that the Call of Duty series also really started to take off once they added splitscreen multiplayer to the games. There's no online multiplayer only game that is able to challenge the best selling games on any system.

Maybe you want to mention GTA IV now, but its sales actually shrinked compared to last generation when it was a pure single player game.

EDIT: I forgot to say that nobody would have expected Killzone 2 to outsell MW2, but nonetheless it was supposed to be one of the big games of this year in a popular genre. Yet it took quite some time until it passed the two million mark which is disappointing to say the least.