Pay To Play Nintendo Games Online
Well, it's not all good news coming out of GDC, as Nintendo has revealed that it will soon start charging for playing games online. The Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service has always been free, but now some games will use a pay-to-play model. "Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection Pay And Play" will have gamers paying per game to play that title online. Such titles will have a red icon on the game box instead of the blue Wi-Fi circle that indicates free online playing. So instead of paying an annual fee like Xbox LIVE that covers all online gaming, gamers will only pay for the games they want to play online. This has the potential to be needlessly confusing.
So far, there's no word on how much playing online will cost per game, but Wii Points will be used. And there's no indication of what titles will use the Pay And Play service, although I'd expect it to be used more for games with a major online focus, like MMOs or something like Super Smash Bros. Although I'd think a lot of Nintendo fans would hit the roof if the upcoming Brawl was the first to use this new pay service. Actually, I'd think Brawl would be too far along at this point, but it could be added to the upcoming Mario Kart Wii. We're also not sure whether this service will be limited to the Wii or if it will also extend to the DS. We'll just have to see how this works out for Nintendo. It might draw in more developers who would now see money come in on a regular basis for online games, but it's also likely to alienate fans. I know I'm not wild about the idea, especially since it might affect the Animal Crossing game in development for the Wii!
Nintendo To Begin Charging Money For Some Online Gaming [Wired.com]
Wootini
Posted to Video Games on 22 February 2008
· Comments (10)
Other stuff like this: nintendo, nintendo wi-fi connection, online, pay and play, wifi, wii
Name: Dave
Given how little I play online on Xbox Live, I doubt I'll be using this at all.
I don't have a huge problem with them charging for online play. BUT....
They had better come up with a more user friendly system than those horrid friend codes!
This has the potential to be highly exploitative. While it is probably too late to enact this in Brawl (thank god) it would be a travesty to do this to something like Mario Kart. The $50 a year the XBL costs, covers all titles for system. If Nintendo were to charge $4 a month to play a game, that would almost be the equivalent charge of XBL for a year.
This isn't exactly an MMO where dynamic content is periodically added, this is a static title that would give only online multi-player. I would rather pay a single flat fee for all titles, than this single title on the fly nonsense.
Sounds like a problem to me. I doubt I'll play any pay titles on-line for the Wii.
To be honest though I had Xbox live for a year and rarely used it.
And even though the PS3's on-line is free I've only played Unreal and Warhawk on it. (both of which rocked)
man there was 1 thing nintendo had going for them when it came to wi-fi and now they're going to crap on that.
this is sad news.
Man, I really, really, really hope that this isn't applied to Animal Crossing.
Before everyone freaks out over this, the announcement was in two parts. The first one was that micro-transaction based downloadable content would be ready to go. The second was that there was now the ability for developers to charge for online play. Currently there was no way to do either within the Wii's OS it's self. The former is in relation to obvious games announced for future release(Rock Band, etc), while the former was in direct response to Capcom's "Monster Hunter 3". All of "Monster Hunter" 's previous games were "pay to play" online, and as stated before, there was no way to do this without a developer working on their own solution. Nintendo has said many time they don't want to charge people to play online, but they're not going to stop 3rd parties from doing as such. This announcement means that Nintendo has now given developers the ability to do either with a unified Wii centric solution...
... and lord that sounded like a press-release...
ackk... forgot to add a link with more in-depth info.
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3166529
Ah, okay, that sounds better, you might want to post that over at Kotaku as well.
I know I'm probably in the minority for an on-line gaming site, but my reaction is "meh." It sounds like it won't be widespread, but even if it were....I just don't go online much to play. My schedule is busy enough that I have little time for actual gaming. The few times I've tried going online (MarioKart DS, Metroid DS) I've literally gotten CREAMED because I'm not an experienced enough gamer. Frankly, it isn't fun to come in last every time. I'm not a sore loser, it's just clear that I don't have the skills to go up against more serious gamers.
I would think this would be even more true for the average Wii owner--so I doubht it will cause much of a problem if fees prevent those folks from going online.
The one that does worry me though is Animal Crossing! I still have not done DS online yet (I need to!!), but I am oh so looking forward to going online with the Wii version.