Coming from a Nintendo customer service rep...
Thanks to Eduardo for the heads up!
Thank you for contacting us. To answer your question, in accordance with the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a parent or guardian must provide consent to set up a Nintendo Network Account for children under age 13 (12 and under). To verify that a parent or guardian has granted consent, they will need to provide a valid credit card number when setting up a Nintendo Network Account for the child.
A one-time fee of $0.50 is charged to verify that a parent or guardian has provided consent. This one-time payment is a commonly used and accepted parental control method required so that parents have the chance to see the payment on their credit card statement, and to alert Nintendo if consent was improperly provided.
To answer your second question, a fee is not needed to set up subsequent child accounts on the system. Once the first child account has been set up, the Parental Control PIN is all that is required to set up additional child accounts. I've included a link below with more information on COPPA and Wii U Parental Controls:
http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/wiiu/en_na/system_settings.jsp?menu=parental_controls_faq&submenu=wup-pc-gi-coppa-overview
Again, thank you for writing. I hope you find the information I have provided helpful.






I've never heard of this sort of thing. Not a bad little revenue stream for doing nothing except set up accounts.
Nintendo's always protecting the kiddies
As opposed to a $30+ XBL account for each individual child?
that's one of the most hilarious twist , fifty cents is too much but three hundred bucks (five years 60$) that's ok . Oh well it's not like the industry is not already extremely biased
When do we come off high alert? I'm not criticizing it. I'd never heard of that account verification method before and I thought of the collective pocket change Nintendo would be getting from it. I made no comparison to XBL or how this is some sort of deal breaker.
Nintendo Crowd Control Patrol is on the case!
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