Nintendo's Fils-Aime talks Wii U's online future

Nintendo of America president and chief operating officer Reggie Fils-Aime has revealed more about the company's online strategy for its new console, the Wii U.

In an interview with Forbes, Fils-Aime acknowledged that Nintendo needed to do more to increase its online presence with its new console.

"What we’re doing is creating a much more flexible system that will allow the best approaches by independent publishers to come to bear," he promised.

"So instead of a situation where a publisher has their own network and wants that to be the predominant platform, and having arguments with platform holders, we’re going to welcome that. We’re going to welcome that from the best and the brightest of the third party publishers."

He also said the Wii U would have "an extremely robust online experience," and that he wanted third party publishers to be the ones talking about it. "We think it’s much more compelling for that information to come from the publishers than to come from us."

Fils-Aime wasn't afraid to address the problem of marketing both the Wii and the Wii U simultaneously.

"Even though the Wii software is backward compatible to Wii U, the branding will be a little bit different, the messaging will be a little bit different. I think we’ve had enough experiences separating out consoles in a transitional period to make that happen."

He was equally confident about the company's focus on a new controller when competitors like Microsoft were pushing hands free gaming with Kinect. "This is not the first time that Nintendo and our competitors have had dramatically different views on the future of gaming."

The Wii U was announced at E3 this year, and sports a unique tablet style controller which streams content from the console. It will feature 1080p high-definition graphics, a multi-core 45 nm microprocessor and will be fully backwards compatible with Wii games and peripherals.