Uh-oh! Wii Pay And Play...

25th Feb 2008, 11:36am by Sammy Barker.

Nintendo are to introduce new extensions to the Nintendo Wi-Fi experience that come with an additional charge. Sammy's not a happy chappy.

During Nintendo's presentation at the Games Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, Takashi Aoyama explained that they will begin "collecting fees for some services [that] will allow us to adapt flexibly." Meaning what Takashi? We can't all see through that business-jargon?

Games that use the new service titled "Pay and Play" will carry a red logo on the box as if to say to Wii owners: "DANGER! DANGER! You have to pay to play with me online. After all Nintendo promised about making gaming cheap, accessible and online gaming free, I am now carrying a monthly fee to zap all your wages so you can't afford to buy any PS3 games."

Seriously though, I'm interested to see what Nintendo are going to do here. If they're introducing something akin to Live with a good 10 games to fully take full advantage of it then I'm convinced.

If we're talking anything less than that you can colour me "pissed off".

Kotaku.com

Wii (System)

User Comments

12:38pm on 25th Feb, 2008

1. By Masterless

Because I'm a tightwad this sounds terrible. The cheapness of the Wii was one of the major reasons I got one.
However, I haven't bothered to invest in any online games because of the lack of them and noone has realy praised the service. Maybe with the money they can get with "Pay and Play" they can afford to make it better....yeah because Nintendo are broke and need this extra revenue.....

01:53pm on 25th Feb, 2008

2. By robwho2

I've been annoyed at the crapness of Nintendo's online play thus far when it's been free.. if they make me pay.. yeah, I won't be pleased. I agree I wouldn't mind paying a little monthly for an Xbox Live type service, but if as is suggested here they are suggesting we pay by game or something whilst using by game friend codes they can fuck right off. I'm not happy.

02:40pm on 25th Feb, 2008

3. By IcyStorm

This screams of Animal Crossing. Note that Nintendo's two biggest online games, Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Mario Kart Wii, are NOT using this system (as far as we know =P). This is probably more for games that require a continuing online world such as MMOs. I'm pretty sure this is for Animal Crossing and any future MMO-like titles.

04:13pm on 25th Feb, 2008

4. By get2sammyb

I was thinking Animal Crossing too - but I read somewhere that Iwata (I think it was) didn't want to do any MMO titles.

07:50pm on 25th Feb, 2008

5. By pHaT-aNt_

Hmm... thats not cool.

Hopefully this will only apply to games I don't want wait and see what happens I guess.