Nintendo's Trying to Catch up with Online Play

Nintendo has at least one big issue with their Wii, regardless of good sales figures and that is, online play. Sure, there are a couple of titles out there making good use of that Wi-Fi connection it sports, but that's not enough. Gamers always want more. They want to play the gritty games online, not the friendly ones. Thus, Next-gen.biz sat down with Nintendo's marketing director, George Harrison (at the E3) and tried getting some answers from him.

I took the liberty of selecting some excerpts to give you a better picture about one single thing: online play for the Wii and how exactly is the company going to fully tap the market:

NextGen: "Earlier this week, Reggie had talked about getting serious about online. Sure, there are a lot of online gamers using Wi-Fi Connection, but I look at things that Sony and Microsoft are doing with their online programs, where they're really creating communities and focusing on user-generated content on top of multiplayer online. Where is Nintendo as far as that goes in regards to Wii? Right now we've only seen a few multiplayer online games like Mario Strikers Charged and Mario Kart Wii."

Harrison: "Yes, they're mostly competitive type games… I think our first project was trying to open up that online gameplay itself to all the publishers and have a variety of those kinds of experiences. The other thing that was important that we just announced recently was WiiWare, so developers can get underway doing some new content and it can be downloaded online. That will come probably I would say in early 2008. It just depends on how long it takes them to get going."

NextGen: "How has the developer reaction been to WiiWare?"

"It's very strong. I think there's a lot of outlets that people want to find for creativity that aren't necessarily going to justify going to a publisher and having a retail sale of a product. You've got to do 200-500,000 units of a product to be able to justify [a published retail game]. But a developer may just have an idea they're working or a character they want to try out to see if it has appeal. So we think it's going to be a really good outlet for them."

So they're basically studying what they can do with WiiWare, in terms of using the Wii online, which is a good start, but a slow one at that. The company banked on other aspects with the Wii when they released it and what they're trying to do now is catch up with the competition. Good luck! is all I can say.