Nintendo has hinted at a unified account-wide experience for Nintendo consoles in the future, something that many Wii U and 3DS gamers alike would love to see. Scott Moffitt, the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Nintendo of America recently spoke about this with GamesIndustry, stating that the company still hasn’t solved the problem, despite competitors using systems that tie accounts to customer purchases, not consoles.
Q: As someone who’s made a pretty significant investment in digital purchases for 3DS, I feel there may be some games that work better on 2DS than on 3DS — Virtual Console, for instance. But the 3DS games that have 3D functionality, I’d rather keep them on the 3DS. It’s not really possible to do that…
Scott Moffitt: It’s not tied to an account. Yeah. We haven’t solved that yet.
Q: Are you working on solving it? It sounds like, to date, Nintendo has been pretty content to keep things as they are.
Scott Moffitt: If you look at the account system, the network ID system that exists now on Wii U, that’s an effort for us to move beyond a device-centric approach to an account-centric approach. But we haven’t done it on the handheld side of the business at this point. We hear that feedback. We hear that criticism, or whatever you want to call it, from time to time. We’re not blind to it. But it’s not something we’ve solved.
It’s interesting to see that Nintendo acknowledges the problem, but doesn’t seem to be any closer to fixing it. As it stands, if your Wii U breaks or your 3DS is stolen, you need to contact Nintendo about all the digital games you’ve purchased. In most cases, supplying a police report for a stolen 3DS is enough for Nintendo to give your digital purchases back, but it’s much, much easier to simply type in a username and have all of your purchases before you.
