Gamertell

North American Nintendo fans got a real treat last month when Nintendo announced that they would finally be bringing over what the rest of the world already got to enjoy, Club Nintendo.

The Club allows customers to gain rewards for purchasing Nintendo products. In return for spending real world cash, club members will gain points or stars to redeem for actual items or even Wii and (soon) DS points.

Unfortunately, the initial announcement left us a little dry on the details, so during an interview with Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo’s executive VP of sales and marketing, MTV Multiplayer decided to dig a little further into the upcoming program’s details. Here’s what they uncovered:

“It’s weighted more toward physical goods: more like the Japanese program than the European which is pretty much digital.”

Just hearing that is enough to make me that much more excited for the program. Especially since Japan received this awesome Club Nintendo-only Super Famicom controller for the Nintendo Wii. Here’s to praying we see this come stateside since there were no details on what kinds of things we would be getting.

MTV Multiplayer also got the details on how the program is going to work:

“When you purchase a Nintendo product, you go on and you say that you’ve purchased a Nintendo product, you get points for that,” Dunaway said. “You also get points for filling out surveys to talk about your experience with the product. You actually get points before you purchase, if you indicate an interest in purchasing… So it really helps us to gauge marketplace demand. As you collect points — these are actually gold coins — you’re able to trade them in for real merchandise.”

Club Nintendo is expected to go live before the end of the year (2008) and this was only reaffirmed during the interview with, “We will launch before the end of the holiday.”

As for what impact Club Nintendo will have on the North American market can only be predicted as another printer of money. Not only could this mean higher sales of shovelware software on the Nintendo Wii but the output of it as well.

How realistic is this going to be to gauge market demands? Asking people to fill out a survey based on their experience with a game is probably as accurate as internet poll. It’s probably best to leave this as a debate for another time.

On the flip side, how excited are you guys for Club Nintendo?

Read [MTV Multiplayer] Also Read [GamerTell] And [GamerTell] Also Read [Kotaku]