In an interview with IGN, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata has let us all know that Nintendo isn’t actively attempting to play the game of catch-up with the online services of Microsoft or Sony. The criticisms of Wii U’s Miiverse have come quickly down the line since launch, namely focusing on some of the features considered “missing” from the Wii U online user experience—no achievements, and how a single account can’t sign into multiple consoles being the biggest complaints.
But Iwata’s response to the criticism stresses that they didn’t think that “offering the same features that already exist within other online communities would be the best proposal for very experienced game players.
Nintendo has paid a great deal of attention to the dynamic of people playing video games together in the same room. With Wii U, we thought about expanding this concept into separate rooms which are connected online. Miiverse is a network community dedicated to video games that represents a very unique game-dedicated social graph that has never existed before.”
And in a classy move, Iwata also apologized for the rather angry-making 1GB day-one update that new Wii U owners had to download the moment they plugged in and turned on their new systems:
“Personally I think that users should be able to use all the functions of a console video game machine as soon as they open the box. So I feel very sorry for the fact that purchasers of Wii U have to experience a network update which takes such a long time, and that there are the services which were not available at the hardware’s launch.”
