Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection approaching 1 million unique users

Pretty impressive number. I wonder how well the Revolution online service will perfom.

On the other hand, that's an average of only 20 connects per person. Is that a good thing?

whats so unique about them

Am I the only one tired of connecting Mario Kart and having the losing player disconnect because they are behind?

Sure, a million have connected, and it is free, but the experience seems to be lacking something.

But I still need my Kart fix each morning while showing that turd who is boss!

Well, personally, I don't connect everyday. Hell, I don't even play it everyday. Frankly, it takes me awhile to connect and then find people to play with. But, given that the service is free, I'm not complaining too much.

Still rather impressive for a service that was launched in November.

I wonder how they determine what makes a "unique" user? Since it's a non-subscription service essentially doesn't that just mean there's almost a million different usernames that have been used? How can they keep track of who is who? I'm not dissing nintendo or anything like that, but when you don't have a service where each person uses one screename only, like WoW, or XBOX live!, doesn't that make it more of an "estimation" of how many people are really using the service? I mean, let's say Jimmy has a DS, and one day he plays under the handle "nintendorox" and the next day he decides he doesn't like that username and changes it to "theelmin8er" instead. So essentially one person used the service, but with 2 "unique" user names. Get it? I'm just curious how they could measure something like this.

You could say that they track IP addresses, but with the ability to play on a wi-fi system, essentially 8 people could be playing off of one wireless router, that is using different download pipes from 1 true IP address. Since the router just assigns it's own "192.168.x.x" IP to each device you can't really track it that way either.

Just something I would like to know.

They would probably use the MAC address which is unique for every device.

Also dsub, nintendo wifi doesn't use usernames, but friend codes, which i think are based on the combination of game cart and ds.

Every DS undoubtably has a unique ID that they can log. That is probably how they can track unique users.

By unique user nintendo is probably referring to unique nintendo DS consoles that have logged on. Each console has a unique serial number that nintendo can use to track the ds. If you register your DS on nintendo.com they would technically be able to track your usage.

I do think the number might be skewed just a tad, however not very far off. It's a pain to go in under a different username so I don't think there are many people trying to utilize a bunch of logins. You have to erase the data from the cart just to do so and you lose your W/L record.