effectively, yes. This was a large part of why nintendo's online strategy was so poor for such a long time. The Switch is the first of their products where they specifically asked the younger employees to lay out what it should look like.
I'll cede that some of Nintendo's online strategy failed, hard, but...outside of a few things, I don't think they did that bad?
Friend codes were actually really neat; they managed to do interesting things in terms of casual online interaction (I still remember being blown away at video chatting with someone half-way across my country on DSi hardware (16MB RAM and ARM processors that weren't even capable of running Linux[1]), in a (first-ish party; Game Freak) video game where it wasn't even a sideshow it was such a small feature), they managed to do pretty painless interaction between your device and a PC in 2010, Flipnote Studio was a really innovative/impressive piece of social media in 2008 (more like Vine than Twitter, really, and first-party), etc.
Like sure, most of their uses of online prior to the Wii U or so were novelty uses, but they were still really well-executed, and at least early-on had a whole lot of genuinely interesting uses of it.
[1] I think there's a port of a very very old version of μClinux that kind of works on the system, so this is only partially true.
>I'll cede that some of Nintendo's online strategy failed, hard, but...outside of a few things, I don't think they did that bad?
Netplay on Nintendo consoles has been terrible. I admit that they did some interesting social things with the handheld consoles, Miis, and leaving comments (Mario Maker, Mario 3D World), but playing anything against another player was almost always terrible.
Smash Brothers has been one of their biggest competitive titles across many generations. Yet on the Nintendo Switch, the 5th iteration of Smash is still unplayable unless you're on a wired connection. Even then, you can still feel the lag in Smash more so than any other fighting game. Street Fighter 5 is notorious in the FGC (Fighting Game Community) for having terrible netcode. Yet I can still have high quality matches on a wireless connection.
You can't share digital games or DLC across accounts bound to the same consoles in a sane manner. Even if you specify that the accounts belong to the same family, it doesn't matter. Nintendo somehow made buying digital assets on a Switch more restrictive and a bigger headache than physical copies.
Don't get me wrong, there's some definite novelty in some of Nintendo's online offerings, but they are definitely stuck in the past.
>the 5th iteration of Smash is still unplayable unless you're on a wired connection
For what it’s worth, I always play Smash Ultimate’s online on Wi-Fi (NAT type A) and practically never have problems with it. Though I guess the average player’s wireless connection might not be very good, and most players don’t use a wired connection as it requires an adapter.
They made some impressive technical achievements, but their overall platform and infrastructure was awful. For example, no unified friend system, different online services for different consoles, no SSO for games.
I think for casual play like Mario Kart, Pokemon, etc, it worked fine. It absolutely hamstrung more complicated efforts like Smash, Metroid, and third parties were forced to all heavily build out their own infra or not build the feature at all.
These were problems that plagued much more powerful systems (Wii, 3DS - until very late in the lifespan of the console, Wii U, and even the Switch)
When did they introduce friend codes? Couldn't you say "Nintendo's online strategy" (should have) started with the original Wii in 2006 and was basically non-existant for years? :)
Only being half-snarky here, I only own a SNES and a GameBoy Advanced.
The Wii was too early, I think (anecdotally, I remember my family couldn't figure out how to get it connected to the internet), given the market it was aiming for (families).
They introduced friend codes with either the original DS or the DS Lite, I believe.
The GameCube had at least one game that was online only: Phantasy Star Online III. And you're telling me a generation later was still too early? Heck, in Japan, both the N64 and the SNES had online capabilities through additional hardware.