No wonder he looks so pleased

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has stated in an interview with IGN that his company is not attempting to play catch-up with rivals Microsoft and Sony when it comes to online services.

With the recent launch of the Wii U and the establishment of Miiverse, Nintendo has recieved a few critical comments regarding features missing from the online side of its user experience. The Wii U currently has no achievements system, and it's not possible to use a single account to sign into multiple consoles, effectively locking user accounts to a single console.

Iwata said:

We have not thought that offering the same features that already exist within other online communities would be the best proposal for very experienced game players.

Nintendo has paid a great deal of attention to the dynamic of people playing video games together in the same room. With Wii U, we thought about expanding this concept into separate rooms which are connected online. Miiverse is a network community dedicated to video games that represents a very unique game-dedicated social graph that has never existed before.

Nintendo's president also apologised for the troublesome 1GB day-one update which users were forced to download as soon as they switched on their shiny new systems:

Personally I think that users should be able to use all the functions of a console video game machine as soon as they open the box. So I feel very sorry for the fact that purchasers of Wii U have to experience a network update which takes such a long time, and that there are the services which were not available at the hardware's launch.

[source eurogamer.net, via uk.ign.com]