It's well documented that Satoru Iwata isn't exactly supportive on free-to-play games, but during an investor Q&A he stated that the Wii U's online architecture will support them with ease.
"We have designed the system from a technical standpoint to allow developers to freely take advantage of things like free to play and micro transactions," Satoru Iwata, Nintendo
Don't get excited that Nintendo may be taking the free-to-play route in the near future.
Currently, we are not actively looking at free to play for our first-party content and I don't think that's a direction that we should go in right now, but that doesn't mean for the future that there may not come a time where we have specific content that might be suited to that model."
Now that DLC is supported on the 3DS we could be heading towards some interesting times for Nintendo.
By Stephen Heller - Bio