Reggie: Wii U's online functionality will be 'flexible' to publishers
If you're looking for Nintendo's Wii U to have a unified online network ... don't. While concrete plans for the system's online functionality have yet to be fully detailed, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime made it sound like it'll be left entirely up to individual publishers in an interview with Forbes.
Nintendo is "creating a much more flexible system," Fils-Aime said, "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."
He said that Nintendo's system would be an "extremely robust online experience," but deferred to publishers regarding specifics. However, during the Ubisoft/Nintendo developer roundtable at E3, Ubisoft continually deferred to Nintendo. We hope this isn't how the actual development of the service is going.
