Wii U online best explained by third-parties - Reggie

July 5th, 2011, 22:38 Posted By: wraggster

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has said third party publishers are best positioned to explain Wii U's online experience.

"We've said that the Wii U will have an extremely robust online experience," the executive told Forbes. "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."

Online gameplay will seemingly be driven by third party publishers running their own networks for their games.

"We've seen what our competitors have done, and we've acknowledged that we need to do more online," Fils-Aime added. "For Wii... 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."

Leaving it up to the publishers to handle online duties rather than having a strict overarching online service like Xbox Live will likely have benefits and drawbacks.

Theoretically, it'll mean lower restrictions on publishers releasing free content and generous patches for their games, but it could also mean features like friend lists and cross-game chat only work on individual publishers' networks, rather than across Wii U's software library.

Activision boss Bobby Kotick said last week that Wii U will support "deep rich multiplayer games".

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