Nintendo Keeps Wii Online Play to Itself
Report says only Nintendo Wii games will support online play this year.
For a company that not long ago blew off online functionality as, to paraphrase, a waste of time, Nintendo has been showing it a lot of love lately. We've got Wii Connect 24, which keeps your Wii online even when it's off. There's Virtual Console, which lets you download games from Nintendo's vast library and new ones too. And of course, there's Wii online play. But Nintendo is being a bit of a Scrooge with this last one.
According to unconfirmed statements at IGN, Nintendo is not supplying helper code for online play to outside developers until next year. What this means is that the only Wii games that will be playable online this year will be Nintendo games.
No big loss, you may say, especially since people who buy Nintendo consoles do so mostly to play Nintendo games. But Nintendo has learned the hard way in the past two hardware generations that it needs third-party support.
This new openness was on show last year already, when Tony Hawk's American Sk8land was one of the first DS games to go online. Ironically, it's games such as Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam for Wii that could suffer.
Nintendo has not made an official comment on this matter and couldn't be reached for a comment by press time.
Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games