Nintendo creating a ‘flexible’ online system for Wii U

Remember back at E3 when Ghost Recon Online producer Adrian Blunt stated that Ghost Recon Online would be doing away with friend codes? Well, if that got your hopes up that the Wii U‘s online service would be comparable to Xbox Live or PlayStation Network, you might end up being a little disappointed.

In a lengthy interview with Forbes, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime discussed Nintendo’s game plan with the Wii U. At one point during the interview, Fils-Aime was asked what the Wii U would be bringing to the table that stands out from the competition. Here’s what he had to say:

“For Wii U, we’re going to take that one step further, and what we’re doing is creating a much more flexible system that will allow the best approaches by independent publishers to come to bear,” he said. “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.”

Nintendo has yet to fully detail the Wii U’s online functions – in fact, pretty much the only thing we know at this point is that the Wii U is capable of online play – but, going by Fils-Aime’s statements, it would appear that the console’s online experience is more on the publisher’s end than Nintendo’s. What this means for the Wii U’s online capabilities as a whole is unclear, but it doesn’t look like we’ll be hearing more about it from Nintendo alone. Fils-Aime went on to say:

“We’ve said that the Wii U will have an extremely robust online experience. 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.”

GamesCom is coming up soon, so maybe Nintendo (or a third-party publisher) will have more to say about it then.

Source: Forbes (via Joystiq)