Nintendo says it’s finally going to get with a module and recover an honest-to-goodness online gaming service, dubbed “Nintendo Network,” that’ll cover both a Wii U and 3DS. Hooray, we think.

Say what we will about Microsoft’s Xbox 360 (and Microsoft’s love for overpriced peripherals, like a mythological $100 USB Wi-Fi adapter), a Xbox LIVE gaming network might be a unaccompanied reason a PlayStation 3′s still in Redmond’s rearview mirror. In a 2011 summary, Microsoft claimed it had 40 million Xbox LIVE members worldwide, out of 66 million Xbox 360 consoles sold. If we assume a 66 million figure’s indeed high formed on poignant rough complement disaster and deputy rates — the supposed “red ring of death” — that LIVE membership figure looks even more impressive.

Sony, by contrast, claimed it had upwards of 70 million purebred PSN users when it was hacked (to a nines) final April, yet a series of profitable members regulating a premium PlayStation Plus service, that launched in Jun 2010, is substantially a fragment of Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE gold-tier base. LIVE stays a indication to beat.

(MORE: Nintendo Chief Promises to Do Wii U Launch Right)

What’s Nintendo been adult to while Sony and Microsoft carve out online empires? Biding a time? Missing in action? In denial? All of a above?

I’ve never used a Wii for multiplayer, and I’ve usually dabbled with a 3DS’s online underline hodgepodge. There’s no clarity of concurrence to a Wii’s channels or a 3DS’s uncomplicated tiles, no overlying horizon restraining a company’s ad hoc online services and multiplayer-enabled games together.

The Nintendo Network could change that, yet it’s tough to ascertain what it’ll volume to formed on association boss Satoru Iwata’s epitome rhetoric. Iwata announced a new height progressing currently during Nintendo’s quarterly financial and process briefing, revelation a stream Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection was “focused on specific functionalities and concepts,” yet claiming that a Nintendo Network will “establish a height where several services accessible by a network for a consumers shall be connected around Nintendo Network use so that a association can make extensive proposals to consumers.”

So it’ll be a place for Nintendo to “comprehensively” sales-pitch users? Probably that, yet also for “competitions and communication among users,” says Iwata. Oh, and downloadable content, yet Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connection technically supports that today.

The genuine takeaway, I’m meditative (further quoting Iwata):

Also for a Wii U, we are formulation to deliver a personal comment complement concordant with Nintendo Network. With this, for example, a palliate of regulating a video diversion complement when a hardware is common by mixed family members, that has been a plea we indispensable to tackle, shall be improved, and we will also be means to erect and offer a complement by mixing a accumulation of opposite services and content.

Sometimes fabrication (in lieu of innovation) is a approach to roll. Sony did it with PlayStation Trophies, Steam did it with Steam achievements, so I’ll go out on a prong and review this as Nintendo’s approach of (obscurely) observant it’s finally going to supplement things like gamer cards and diversion achievements (including some form of altogether score) and safeguard destiny games belong to height standards. And with a small luck, we’ll even see “communication among users” interpret as cross-service voice chat. At slightest give us those 3 out of a gate, Nintendo.