At the Game Developers Conference Nintendo's Takashi Aoyama has announced a new feature for Nintendo's Wi-fi service called Pay and Play. As part of this new Wii owners will be able to purchase Downloadable content (DLC)
So far playing online through Nintendo's service has been free of charge Aoyama explained that Nintendo will begin "collecting fees for some services [that] will allow us to adapt flexibly." The idea of pay and play is that gamers will not be tricked into buying games they cannot play for free. A red logo next to the standard blue Wi-fi logo (above) will indicate games which require the pay and play service to take advantage of full online play.
Don't let this worry you to much as most games such as the up-coming highly anticipated Super Smash Bros Brawl and Mario Kart will continue to be support free online play. It is believed that this service will be for games such as MMO which is backed up by the fact that subscriptions will be per game rather than taking the Xbox Live approach by paying for the service.
At this stage it appears the Pay and Play feature will only be a factor on the Nintendo Wii although the Nintendo Wi-fi service is also available on the DS leaving the possibility for the service to make its way to Nintendo's handheld.
While Nintendo has said nothing about Pay and Play affecting DS owners surely it's gone through their minds, we'd love to hear your thoughts, do you thin DS owners will face the same fate as Wii online gamers?
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slinky16 said: well as long as the ds and brawl are free im happy