Iwata Asks for StreetPass Relay Points launches as service struggles to perform

There's some good news and bad news here. The good news is, an Iwata Asks for the StreetPass Relay Point service has just opened up, which you can find right here. Iwata took a moment to explain why this service is so important outside of Japan.

In America, the amount of StreetPass encounters that would occur was only about one-tenth to that of Japan. I thought that was way too little, as if it was missing a zero. Then I found out that it was even less in Europe. Even though the number of systems sold and the number of customers who had experienced StreetPass didn’t differ that much between each region, the number of encounters was drastically smaller. When you walk around a city in Japan, StreetPass is happening fairly frequently, so it’s a habit for a lot of people to walk around with their Nintendo 3DS. And I think not a few people go out with their Nintendo 3DS in America or Europe as well in hopes of having a StreetPass encounter. But I suspect that a lot of them must have gone home disappointed after not having passed anyone.

That's all well and good, but the service needs to actually work for it to have an impact. Various messageboard posts and commentary online is indicating that there's a problem with the service right now. Select spots have just stopped working altogether, with connection issues and other errors cropping up. It seems that locations like Starbucks, McDonald's, & AT&T Wireless Stores are having service issues. That goes for the Nintendo Zone service as well. Hopefully Nintendo will hop on this issue and correct it soon.

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