What are the chances of Nintendo killing Wii-U online support when the NX launches?
Let's do some basic analysis:
According to Nintendo (30/06/2016), MK8 has sold 7.7 million units. So from a simplistic perspective, you might say "Goodness, that's nearly 8 million customers potentially resistant to upgrading to MK9 because of MK8 Online - we must shut it down!".
But it's very important to remember that MK8 launched with a unique Wii U offer of a free download code for one of several appealing titles (I went with LoZ:WWHD, fwiw ). The game also went on to win Eurogamer's, The Guardian's, and NintendoLife's Staff GOTY award...
...but MK8 wasn't able to significantly improve the Wii U's buy-up rate. Why was this?
Well obviously the general sales issues the Wii U had and the anti-Wii U sentiment that had embedded itself in the industry at the time are major factors.
But I think it's also important to remember that shortly before MK8 released, Nintendo announced that (coincidentally?) the servers running Mario Kart Wii Online (amongst many other games) were being shut down a few weeks after MK8's release.
Mario Kart Wii has now sold 36.75 million units. Imagine if Nintendo had done something to incentivise MKWii owners to upgrade to MK8, instead of beating them with the "We're taking your online away" stick.
In my view that was bad PR when they shut down MKWii's servers. Whatever the external factors for it, Nintendo could have done something to prevent it being perceived as an all too obvious push from the Wii version to the Wii U version. It leaves those millions of customers with a sour taste in their mouth at the end, rather than being full of fond memories.
When you've managed to get that many customers in your hand, it's really not good business practice to feed them stones like that. You want to hold on to those customers and make those customers feel valued and glad they invested in Nintendo - in doing so you'll have a much better chance of securing some customer loyalty from them for the future.
Given Nintendo's current position in the market, I think it would be really unwise of them to repeat that mistake and not be seen to be supporting the Wii U customer base, at least in terms of keeping the servers running (let's face it, game development is long gone), well into the NX era.
In light of the above, it's probably pretty likely MK8's online service will be dropped the week before NX launches, knowing Nintendo.
@gcunit Your facts are a bit mixed up. Wii and DS servers were shutdown (the actual shutdown, not the warning) on May 20th, 10 days before MK8 launch.
As for what I think, I'm leaning towards the rumour suggesting that instead of creating new online multiplayer games, Nintendo will recycle Wii U ones (MK8, Smash Wii U, etc.) and have crossplay.
@Grumblevolcano Yep, more haste, less boost in my posting. I was referring to Wikipedia whilst writing it and for some reason thought I read MK8 launched in April, so I based my post on that, even though in my own memory it was a May 2014 game.
I don't remember the details but the reason the Wii and DS Wi-Fi was cut had to do with a third party company that owned the servers, so Nintendo probably had little to no control over that. Wii U and 3DS servers are run by Nintendo themselves which is why those ended up ok.
Besides, I think it would be terribly unwise for Ninty to shutdown Wii U's WiFi service after NX's release. So many of its popular games rely on that — Splatoon, Super Mario Maker, Smash Bros to name just a few.
@FriedSquid Nintendo could easily have made arrangements for the end of MKWii online to not coincide with MK8. It was badly handled.
But the shutdown was due to the third party, Nintendo probably had little control over the shutdown date. So should they have rushed MK8 before the shutdown? Or move the date further ahead away from the shutdown, leaving people with no way of playing any console Mario Kart online at all?
I think I'm not understanding why the shutdown date was relevant to the release of MK8. I think it was merely a coincidence that we got a new Mario Kart after the previous one went kaput. Besides, it's not like Mario Kart was the only game to have its online shut down — as an example, Brawl also went down but even still we had to wait until November until Smash Wii U.
So basically my point is that it was a coincidence that online MKWii went down around the time of MK8's release, and now that the Wii U servers are in Nintendo's control, they probably will stay online along with NX servers for quite a while. The NX release shouldn't affect MK8's online at all.
@FriedSquid How do you think third parties came to be in control of servers for Nintendo's games?
It wasn't just chance. It was a business arrangement whereby Nintendo would have compensated the third party, presumably in the form of money.
Even if the third party decided completely independently that the server's had to be shutdown when they were, Nintendo could have paid to extend them, or simply taken the hosting to another third party.
Otherwise what was to stop the third party deciding to shutoff the server's 6 months after MKWii launched? Or earlier?
They'd have been a contract.
You guys had me at blood and semen.
What better way to celebrate than firing something out of the pipe?
I hope we get more brand crossovers with Callie and Marie hopefully making appearances amongst others in MK9. The character roster in MK8 was poor - too many colours and different outfits classed as new characters along with Bowsers' minions...Bowser and Bowser Jr are enough thanks!
I'll be honest here: I would rather play with main characters of the Mario universe introduced in 1988 that still weren't playable characters and I happen to like than character from other games (but in MK8 we had both).
I'd rather have Bowser Jr., Dry Bones, King Boo, Diddy Kong and Kamek than Callie, Marie, Link, Isabelle and the Villagers in MK9, too.
You actually have a really valid point there, I didn't think of those. would love Dixie and Funky Kong thrown in the roster.
TBH I wish Daisy would leave as a "main/playable character" in all of the Mario brand games and replace her with Rosalina.
@FriedSquid How do you think third parties came to be in control of servers for Nintendo's games?
It wasn't just chance. It was a business arrangement whereby Nintendo would have compensated the third party, presumably in the form of money.
Even if the third party decided completely independently that the server's had to be shutdown when they were, Nintendo could have paid to extend them, or simply taken the hosting to another third party.
Otherwise what was to stop the third party deciding to shutoff the server's 6 months after MKWii launched? Or earlier?
They'd have been a contract.
Actually, not only MKW, hundreds of games had their online modes affected, because the third party that acquired GameSpy didn't want to run the servers anymore:
Beside patching everyone of its games using Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, even 3rd party ones, there was little Nintendo could do except creating Nintendo Network for the new games, with servers that are owned and ran by Nintendo, this is why I am a bit worried about DeNA managing the online infrastructure of some future Nintendo services.
@Grumblevolcano The Wii U exploit is yet to be fixed since months, so at this point it's not unusual to see hackers, especially at famous events. Nintendo doesn't even seem to ban hackers of Mario Kart 8 anymore.
I hope we get more brand crossovers with Callie and Marie hopefully making appearances amongst others in MK9. The character roster in MK8 was poor - too many colours and different outfits classed as new characters along with Bowsers' minions...Bowser and Bowser Jr are enough thanks!
I'll be honest here: I would rather play with main characters of the Mario universe introduced in 1988 that still weren't playable characters and I happen to like than character from other games (but in MK8 we had both).
I'd rather have Bowser Jr., Dry Bones, King Boo, Diddy Kong and Kamek than Callie, Marie, Link, Isabelle and the Villagers in MK9, too.
You actually have a really valid point there, I didn't think of those. would love Dixie and Funky Kong thrown in the roster.
TBH I wish Daisy would leave as a "main/playable character" in all of the Mario brand games and replace her with Rosalina.
Daisy has been around since the Gameboy era, so while I wish that they'd make her somewhat interesting, I can't imagine them removing her from all future Mario racing/sport/party games.
I think what I'm hoping for in terms of characters in MK9 would be character skins. Instead of having Mario, Metal Mario, Baby Mario, and Tanooki Mario, you would select Mario, and then choose which skin you wanted to use, each with their own stats and attributes. It would similar to how Yoshi and Shy Guy got different colours. Other characters could have it too. Here are some examples I've thought of:
Wario - He could choose between his classic Wario outfit, his Warioware outfit, and his Master of Disguise outfit (because I love that game despite the critics).
Koopa Troopa - They could have their red and green shells, and the Koopa Paratroopa could be a lighter variant.
Baby Mario - Why waste all of those extra character slots on Baby Luigi, Baby Peach, Baby Daisy, and Baby Rosalina, when you can just squeeze them into one?
Bowser Jr. - The same as the idea for the Babies, but with the Koopalings.
By doing that, it leaves ample opportunity for more original characters that we all want, like more of the DK Crew, King Boo, ROB, and none other than King K. Rool.
@Portal_King Technically, ROB is not part of the Mario universe since its games were not related to Mario, it can actually be considered, along with Pac-Man, one of the first character from other franchises. This is no longer that much of an issue, of course, since both the Mario Kart Arcade GP games and Mario Kart 8 feature some characters from other franchises.
That being said, the multi slot you are describing is already in use: in Mario Kart Arcade GP DX Tanooki Mario and Fire Mario are in the same slot as Mario, same for Ice Luigi being in the same slot as Luigi. Actually, Dry Bowser is even in the same slot of Bowser. Since that game was developed by Nintendo and Namco Bandai like Mario Kart 8, I find it very likely that in Mario Kart 8 the slots were actually deliberately filled with alternate costumes to show a roster that seemed bigger than it is; the Villager slot indeed revealed that even characters with different stats can stay in the same slot, and after all, I now realize that the Mii slot already showed us this possibility in the very first version of Mario Kart 8...
the reason they might have had for doing this? Very simple: the developers ran out of time and couldn't make more characters, but still they wanted to show a roster that wasn't smaller than that of Mario Kart Wii. In the end, there are 22 Mario characters in Mario Kart 8, without counting alternate versions, Mario Kart Wii had 19 of them (maybe 18, Dry Bones shares at least all the trick animations with Koopa Troopa), so I can see this as a smart move to hide this otherwise small improvement.
@Mister_Wu Since I've only ever seen in ROB in MK and SSB (aside from the physical version of him), I guess I've kind of associated him with the Mario universe.
I really need to up my game with the history of Mario Kart, because I don't know anything about the arcade games except that Pac-Man features in one of them. And since the multi-slot idea has been used in previous games, it sure does seem likely that variants are used as separate characters just to increase the roster. Hopefully MK9 will have a longer development period, allowing them to add more unique characters to the game, while making sure those tracks look as splendid as they did in MK8.
@Portal_King Don't worry at all, as you noted it's Nintendo who put it in Mario Kart DS and in the Super Smash Bros. series, making many people think it was a Mario character!
The Mario Kart Arcade games are pretty unknown, especially because the international version often don't allow saving the progress and offer a very limited experience as a result, the Japanese version of Mario Kart Arcade GP DX is way better than the international one in this regard. So, don't be surprised if you hardly know anything about them, either.
I corrected my message in the meantime with a list of four characters that were definitely cut from Mario Kart 8 and will likely return (Diddy Kong, Dry bones, King Boo, Bowser Jr.), I too hope that more time will be dedicated to the development of the next Mario Kart game, as Mario Kart 8 clearly had problems in the roster and in Battle Mode; looking at the PRIMA guide it also seems that the item system was changed at the last minute so that the distributions (intended for a position-based system) were chosen depending on the distance from the frontrunner, and there isn't any victory ceremony either. The developers apparently put most of their effort on the tracks, which is not a bad idea, since they are a fundamental part of a racing game and in the end I find them pretty good from an art direction point of view (both sound, settings and visuals) and pretty fun to drive in too. I agree with you: now it's time to also care about the other aspects without dedicating less effort on the tracks!
Having multiple characters in one slot wouldn't work with Mario/Metal Mario/baby Mario or Bower Jr/Koopalings because they're not all in the same weight group, unless they put characters who weigh different in one slot.
Having multiple characters in one slot wouldn't work with Mario/Metal Mario/baby Mario or Bower Jr/Koopalings because they're not all in the same weight group, unless they put characters who weigh different in one slot.
This is actually already done in Mario Kart 8, both for the Miis and for the Villagers (Female Villager is Catweight, Male Villager is Tanookiweight).
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