14 DAY TRIAL // After confirming that Nintendo won’t charge Wii U owners a subscription for accessing the console’s online services, the company’s President and CEO, Satoru Iwata, has admitted that the company can’t promise that all of the Wii U’s features will be free.
Nintendo is going to release the Wii U later this year at an undisclosed time for an undisclosed price.
Until then, the company is busy confirming all sorts of details concerning the new home console and revealed a few days ago that it wouldn’t be charging a subscription for owners of the console to interact with others or engage in multiplayer experiences, unlike Microsoft’s Xbox Live policy.
Now, Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata cleared a few things up and said that, while the core online functionality would most certainly be free, some services might still require a fee, depending on how costly they were for the Japanese company.
"We cannot promise that Nintendo will always provide you with online services free of charge no matter how deep the experiences are that it may provide," he said.
"But at least we are not thinking of asking our consumers to pay money to just casually get access to our ordinary online services."
This stance is a bit different than the one he took last week, when he said that charging a fee for online services would hamper the Wii U’s sales.
"We have a wide variety of consumers, from the ones who enthusiastically play video games to those playing more casually, who are not always interested in them but try to play a game only when it has become a public topic or play it just during certain periods, like a year-end season and summer vacation," he said at that time.
"We therefore believe that services which ask our consumers to obtain paid memberships are not always the best."
Nintendo can easily adopt Sony’s current strategy, which is to allow multiplayer for free and offer a PlayStation Plus membership that gives members access to free games, big discounts, and much more.