Nintendo's Wii U Miiverse Will be a Standalone Social Network #Mistake

GamesIndustry has announced Nintendo's confirmation that its upcoming Miiverse will not connect to other current social networking sites like Facebook. Instead of using them, it seems as though Nintendo plans to make its Miiverse an outright competitor. "What we have discussed so far... I think it is the other way around, from any devices in the future you will be able to access the Miiverse, from mobile phone or laptop," said Nintendo of Europe's Laurent Fischer. "You can check what's going on and even participate."

Like facebook and twitter, Miiverse will allow users to interact through texting and video. However, unlike Facebook and twitter, the Miiverse will be moderated, with posts possibly taking up to a full 30 minutes before actually appearing.

While both PlayStation and Xbox allow for its audience to access said networking sites, Nintendo will not be offering those same services, instead playing catch up to facebook and twitter with its own social service. "On the Wii U we do have additional reasons for connecting, we talked about things like the video chat system, nothing revolutionary but it's going to be convenient, it's going to be easy...And the Miiverse is the one actually that I believe has a very unique feature which is we put ourselves in the situation of making sure the people you can communicate with they are somehow already in a kind of community. The community will be the Wii U owners, who will have this common interest for video games and our expectation about that is it's going to be a way to enhance the idea of sharing information on the video game."

In doing so, Nintendo is essentially cordoning itself off by not allowing its audience access to anything outside of Nintendo, almost as if the Miiverse network will maintain a sort of "for Wii U players, by Wii U players" attitude.

But Fischer seems to think that this is a good thing, saying, "One thing that is very important to us is that somehow you could pick up information from people you trust, maybe on games that you wouldn't consider naturally. Because Miiverse will show you what are the topics or the games played at the moment within the community. And then you may have one interesting comment that will trigger your curiosity and then maybe you will get more information on that game and then at the end what is important to make sure people have different game play experiences. So considering a game that you wouldn't consider it's like enlarging your scope in terms of gaming, and that's the key point for us," he concluded.