A new online era for Nintendo?

When Nintendo's CEO and president is vocally unhappy about something, you know it's going to filter down and action will be taken to try to rectify the problem.

Speaking at the investor's meeting as part of E3 2010, Satoru Iwata professed Nintendo's dissatisfaction with its own online efforts. That was over a year ago, and since then, the company has rolled out a more functional online set-up for the 3DS compared to its predecessor. With the upcoming Wii U, we're still left wondering what Nintendo's plan is as little has been unveiled.

Speaking to Forbes, president of Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Aime was asked whether something was missing from Nintendo's online services, resulting in gamers not getting the same experience as they would on other consoles. Fils-Aime replied:

I don’t think it is an issue for us, and here’s why. We’ve seen what our competitors have done, and we’ve acknowledged that we need to do more online, starting with the launch of our eShop on Nintendo 3DS, and we’re going to continue to build our online capability. For Wii U, we’re going to take that one step further, and what we’re doing is creating a much more flexible system that will allow the best approaches by independent publishers to come to bear. So instead of a situation where a publisher has their own network and wants that to be the predominant platform, and having arguments with platform holders, we’re going to welcome that. We’re going to welcome that from the best and the brightest of the third party publishers.

So it's possible we might have separate "online accounts" for different publishers, not unlike what we already have, but the key thing here is that they will now be able to work on a "more flexible system" provided by Nintendo.

When pushed for more details, Fils-Aime reiterated that the Wii U will have a more robust online presence but any further information will probably have to come from elsewhere:

We’ve said that the Wii U will have an extremely robust online experience. There will be other publishers talking about that as well, and from our perspective, we think it’s much more compelling for that information to come from the publishers than to come from us.

[source blogs.forbes.com]