Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé has shared that their new My Nintendo membership service is seen as a “tremendously ambitious” replacement for the now retired Club Nintendo.
It will track activity across smart devices and their dedicated game systems, whether that be for playing games, watching videos or visiting their collaborative rides at Universal Studios. That meant that the mechanics behind the service had to be “completely rethought and redone,” which necessitated Club Nintendo’s closure.
“Club Nintendo as a program really at its heart rewarded existing players and rewarded them initially with physical goods, and later on here in the Americas with digital goods, digital content, full games that we made available to consumers that they used their Play Nintendo coins to get access to,” Fils-Aimé discussed with TIME. “What’s different with My Nintendo, is that My Nintendo is meant to be the virtual hub for all of your consumer interactions with Nintendo IP.”
He continued to explain: “Meaning playing a smart device app from Nintendo, it recognizes that you’ve done that and you’ll be rewarded for that activity. Purchase games for our dedicated game systems, My Nintendo will know, you’ll be rewarded for that activity. Play games, watch videos, conceptually go to Universal Studios, the thought process is that this is a more robust and sticky way for you as a consumer to interact with all things Nintendo, for it to be tracked, and then for you to be rewarded for all that activity. Given that much larger vision, the mechanics of the program needed to be completely rethought and redone. And that’s why we sunsetted Club Nintendo to create this new program.
“[My Nintendo] is tremendously ambitious. It is something where we’re trying to take a very complicated concept and simplify it as much as we can. But that’s why we had to make the transition from one program into something that’s very different in execution.”
