Wii Speak No Evil

News has hit today that the Wii Speak, a microphone attachment fo your Wii that will allow you to voice chat with other Wii gamers, has a serious customer service flaw. The Wii Speak can be bought separately or with the new Animal Crossing game released next week. It will work with upcomming games, the updated version of the Browser Channel, and a special Wii Speak Channel. The device will ship with a 16 character code that will allow you to download the special Wii Speak channel.

The problem is that, according to sources, the code will not be replaceable. And there will be no other way to download the Wii Speak channel. This means that if you misplace your code, or buy the Wii Speak second-hand, you're out of luck. This is angering potential customers.

I, personally, don't believe this will be an issue. There is no logical reason why Nintendo can't give out additional codes. If you don't have the hardware, then having the channel will do you no good. Unless they've forgotten to lock the channel to only be able to use the Wii Speak, and not other USB microphones. But that would be silly.

In fact, I predict that within a month of the release of the device (and Animal Crossing), the Wii Speak channel will be much easier to get. Even if you have to pay a few hundred points for it.

That or Nintendo will find that no one's using the channel anyway becuase they'd much rather be in a game. Or on the phone. Or using tin cans. Or perhaps smoke signals. I can't see a reason to use the Wii Speak outside of a game that isn't better served by other technology.

I think that this was probably just a bad bit of policy that didn't get vetted or thought through very well. With the amount of press it's getting, a correction is bound to show up soon. The power of the Internets shows itself again.