GDC 08: Nintendo announces Wii Pay and Play

Would you ever pay for a good service on the Wii? Like it or not, the future seems to have it in store for Wii owners. Nintendo’s Takashi Aoyama recently announced Wii Pay and Play to the GDC audience, and it looks as if the service extension will ask people to pay for online services related to particular games.

More on this after the jump!

Nintendo’s Takashi Aoyama recently dropped a lot of information on the GDC audience, but we’ve found one interesting bit that we’ve yet to reveal to our readers. Apparently, Nintendo has announced a service extension known as Wii Pay and Play, and it seeks to make some aspects of the online functionality of the Wii a paid affair.

Kotaku’s post has a quote from Aoyama about the whole thing. It seems the Wii Pay and Play will be “collecting fees for some services [that] will allow us to adapt flexibly.” For lack of a better way of explaining it, imagine that the money collected will be used to, as Kotaku put it, “explore new concepts and channels.”

To ensure that no one makes a mistake, Nintendo has also announced the use of a new red logo that’ll be put beside the WiFi logo to announce that a particular function is a Pay and Play service.

No other details were given, but rest assured that we’ll be giving you more information on the Pay and Play initiative when it becomes available. In the meantime, feel free to comment on what you think of the Pay and Play service extension below.

Via Kotaku