Business - Written Tuesday, February 26, 2008 by Don Tapscott - 1 Comment

Keep an eye on Nintendo Pay to Play

During a recent game developers conference, Nintendo’s Takashi Aoyama announced a new Pay to Play program. Details were few and far between, but it appears that it will go like this – Nintendo will begin charging for certain parts of certain online games. In order to help limit customer confusion, such games will have a red “Pay to Play” sticker on the bottom. Payment will be done by Wii points. Everything else appears to be up in the air still (at least in terms of public disclosure).

This has led to a bit of a guessing game about what exactly Nintendo is up to, given that they have been vocal about maintaining the “free” price point for online game access in the past. Comment boards were made for guessing games, and if you scroll through ones like this there are a some interesting insights scattered throughout. Notably, it would appear that this is being set-up so 3rd party studios can sell games through the Nintendo Wii platform… which could evolve into a very interesting wikinomics business model indeed.

But I don’t want to speculate too much yet – just keep an eye on how Nintendo’s Wii platform, Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio 2.0, and others evolve and compete against each other as game makers, experience creators, platform providers, and a variety of other ways. It’s one of those industries that is on the bleeding edge of change, and there will likely be valuable lessons for people in all sorts of other industries.