Mike Bantick
Monday, 25 February 2008 06:06
Opinion and Analysis
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Sony and Microsoft are evil, Nintendo fights for the side of good, we all know that, right? Well maybe that rather romantic preconception is changing as Nintendo take a step towards the ka-ching! way of doing business online.
Long the bastion of promoting free services such as the Wi-Fi Connection, has Nintendo realised that there is a buck to be made in this instead?
At the Game Developers Conference last week, project leader Takashi Aoyama from Nintendo announced that certain games will now fall into the Pay And Play category, getting a red sticker on the front of the title instead of the friendly blue free to play games.
According to Aoyama “collecting fees for some services [that] will allow us to adapt flexibly." I am not sure what that means exactly, and Aoyama did not clarify further, other than to mention Wii points as the payment method, so now the speculation begins.
As some commentators have mentioned, if this kind of pay for play model affects games from the Massive Multiplayer Online category then so be it, this is a model that most of the gaming community is comfortable with. But, if suddenly this applies to online games of Mario Kart then there may be an issue.
Having said that, many of the ten million subscribers of Microsoft’s excellent LIVE service, perhaps not happily, pay US$50 for the Gold service.
