I was surprised this wasn't posted.
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3141656
Some highlights:
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3141656
Some highlights:
EGM: All right. We like free.
RFA: Free is good.
Hmmm. This isn't exactly confirming that the Rev will be wireless only. And that whole 'lack of ethernet jack' business was on the concept model, so who knows?EGM: Let's start off now with Revolution by getting to the online side of things. How that going to be different from what's already out there? Microsoft had it pretty well handled with Xbox Live.
RFA: As we get into the Internet space, the first way we're going to get there, obviously, is with Nintendo DS, which is going to be having wireless-enabled games for this holiday season. So principles that we're applying for DS are the same principles we're going to apply for Revolution, which is, we want to make it easy and included for the consumer. We want our games to be, if you will, optimized for online play. We want it to be free, so that there are no cost barriers, but we want it to be an overall fun experience so that there's also no what I call experience barriers.
By doing all that, we believe we can drive up our participation rate of online play to be well in excess of about the 15 percent you see today. And the 15 percent comes from a number of industry sources, but if you think about it, 15 out of every 100 consumers who buy an online game actually go and play it online. That's pretty small. Versus what we want to see, for example, with Mario Kart, is we want to see 80, 90, 95, near 100 percent of folks who actually enjoy the experience so much, who have access to the experience, to go do it online.
That, philosophically, is quite different than what our competitors do. There's going to be no subscription fee; we're not looking at this as a profit-driven program. We're looking at it as a way to bring more enjoyment and satisfaction to the game. And we think with what we're doing on Kart, what we're going to be doing on Animal Crossing, what we're going to be doing on future Revolution wireless Internet games, we think that's a fundamentally different model than what's being done today.
Sounds good so far.EGM: So you would say for Revolution, that we should expect more of those key franchises you already have to kind of drive and launch Revolution?
RFA: Absolutely. And as Mr. Iwata said, so we're working on our next true Mario platformer for Revolution; we're working on our next Metroid, and we showed snippets of that work. And I'm actually meeting with Michael Kelbaugh to spend some time with him to understand the vision for our next Metroid Prime game. You'll see Zelda. You'll see Smash Bros. And Mr. Iwata certainly wants that to be a wireless Internet-enabled game because we know it would be so much fun for the core gamer.
So absolutely, for Revolution you will see all of our franchises, plus, we've gone on record to say that we are aggressively working on a number of new franchises. And that is something that has been a criticism of the past, you know, "Folks, are you milking Mario and doing too many Mario-type games?" We are hard at work at new franchises and we believe that's going to be critical to the launch of Revolution.