I think a big part of the friend code choice is their focus on younger gamers. I think Nintendo's intentionally tried to make it hard for people to become friends who don't know each other outside of the Nintendo ecosystem. They don't want to be seen as an avenue for children being taken advantage of, they don't want parents worrying about what their kids do on a Nintendo platform, etc.

I'm not saying it's the right call, or that in this day and age, we haven't moved past that in many respects, but I'm willing to bet that's a big part of their lack of online focus.

The age control and granularity of control over what my son can do is far superior on the Nintendo consoles than either the PlayStation, Xbox, iOS or Android.

And yes, my ex have had total freak-outs over several of the other platforms due to ridiculous decisions (Plants vs. Zombies on the Xbox making it an outright pain to find out not to have random strangers suddenly broadcast their conversation to you - seemingly without realising - and liberally using the n-word, for example... whoever thought it was a good idea to have player audio broadcast without making it easy to mute on either end without muting all in game sound is a total idiot), or numerous iOS games that are otherwise great that allow unrestricted chat where my son has several times come across rather disgusting behaviour.

In general I'm not so worried in my sons case - he knows what he's not allowed to tell people, and he knows what not to repeat, but I can see why a lot of parents would find many games that otherwise would be perfectly age appropriate problematic to let their kids play.

Word on the street is that the higher echelons of Nintendo are absolutely terrified of a pedophile picking up children on their network. When views through that lens, all of their Internet decisions make sense.

That's almost certainly why it is how it is - remains to be seen if they catch up to everyone else with this console though.