In a surprise announcement, Nintendo has released a new channel for the Wii, called the Everybody Votes Channel. It’s essentially a worldwide polling station with cute little questions aimed to bring the Wii community closer. The channel is immediately available in the Wii Ware section of the Shop Channel, and is free of charge.
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This is seriously out of the blue. I don’t think anyone expected to see something like this. When I first heard about it, I thought Nintendo was finally going to let me voice my concerns over the Virtual Console service (damn those prices), but it’s not exactly like that.
The polls are nothing that important. Take the first one, for example: “What is a more romantic Valentine’s gift?” with choices of “Chocolates” or Roses.” Not exactly what I was hoping for, but it seems that Nintendo is starting to create a community with the Wii. There’s two other regional polls at the moment, with one worldwide one, so hop on and check it out.
After submitting your vote (which is associated with your Mii), you get to predict what everyone else will vote for. Soon you will be able to compare your votes and see how often you vote in the majority. The first poll ends in one day, with another ending in three, and the last one ending in six days from now.
Another cool feature is the ability to submit your own questions and answers. I went and tested it out, submitting the age-old question of “What’s the best writing tool?” with Pen and Pencil as the available choices. Nintendo then warns you that the submission is now owned by them and may be used for future polls. Pretty cool, I thought.
Sadly, this channel has no real use, other than to make it feel as if you are connected with all the other Wii owners out there. It’s a fun little diversion, and I like the fact that Nintendo went the extra mile and added it to the system, but I was hoping for something a little more powerful in terms of a democratic voice.
But it’s free, it’s easy to use, and it’s a pretty neat concept, with voting going on all over the world. I think Nintendo is doing a fantastic job with these channels, and we should all join in on the fun and participate. Hopefully we’ll get even more surprises like this in the future.
Oh, and dogs are way better than cats.
[Image and info via GoNintendo]
Even if the current polls have little direct use, this is essentially going to function as a global instant feedback mechanism for Nintendo. They can track the majority opinion on issues, identify outlying groups and countercultures in the population, correlate commonly held opinions to establish definite numbers on their market composition, and even if they never field questions about online multiplayer in the VC, the number of people submitting them will be a valuable statistic.
Exactly. So I say screw them and their attempt at free market research.
I still think its cool.
I’ve enjoyed it so far, now that I see how you can view each result. It’s pretty neat the way you can predict the majority answer. I’d like to see more interesting polls, but it’s kind of neat the way it all works. Half of my answers probably aren’t going to be too serious, anyway.
I still haven’t used it