Host to over a million unique players in just five months, the Wi-Fi Connection has been a great success. But what is in store for its future?

Gaming site IGN has interviewed the lead on Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection service, Takao Ohara, at the Game Developer's Conference, and have apparent information that more than forty games are in development that will support the service on the DS, not to mention those for the Revolution which will support the sevice as well.

IGN: We've seen the service evolve with each game's release - Mario Kart limited to a basic interface, but Animal Crossing allows for features like text chatting. And in Metroid Prime Hunters we get voice chat and a lobby system for game matching. Will we continue to see new features to the system?

Ohara: Yes, we'll be continuing to add new features to the service as the games need them. Even now we're working on new features for future use. I do want to clarify something about the current feature list - we're not limited to the types of features we're ready to introduce, but we do limit them to the types of games online. For example, in Mario Kart players have the ability to play with anyone in the world to see how they stack up, but we still needed to have the comfortable experience�so for that reason we didn't include chat with the game. In Animal Crossing, the only people that can visit your village are the ones that you trust with your Friend Code. So, for that reason, you can chat. We certainly could have included chat with Mario Kart, but in doing so we might have failed in our aim to overcome the casual gamer's psychological barriers of online gaming.

IGN: The interface seems to be all different in each Nintendo DS Wi-Fi game. Are you planning on having something similar to Xbox Live on the Revolution?

Ohara: The Nintendo DS is a handheld and the Revolution is a console, so you have to take into consideration how you apply Wi-Fi and the internet to a console versus a handheld. So you can expect the way to play online to change on the Revolution. We're still in the process of determining how it will change, so you'll be hearing about that later. We will still be adhering to our principals of online gaming, which is Simple, Comfortable, and Free.

To read the interview in full, click here!