Speaking to Official Nintendo Magazine, Yusuke Amano, the man charged with coordinating development of the recently releasedStar Fox 64 3D between Nintendo and Q-Games, said that the game's lack of online multiplayer was due to cost and time restrictions.
"Personally, I play a lot of online FPS games," he said. "This leads me to think that just making multiplayer parts of existing games playable online isn't enough to create a satisfying experience for users. The popular online games work in lots of things, so they play well online - and if we wanted to satisfy everyone who bought the game, the costs required for including online support would be vast.
"For this project what we needed to do was use Star Fox to provide users with a game that shows the appeal of Nintendo 3DS as quickly as possible. We put a lot of effort into the graphics, and if we had included online support then we couldn't have reached this level in the time allowed."