Honestly, it feels like Nintendo decided they should start charging for online since free online play didn't seem to be helping them gain much in sales from that stance. But then they just sort of let the market decide what to charge. As soon as it was announced that there would be paid online, within a week people were throwing out the amount of $20 per year and then people were like, well, I guess that's not TOO bad. Did Nintendo really know a year and a half ago that $20.00 would be the price yet still had so many other details of the service undecided that they still don't even know what they special offers will be? It just seems like the internet reached a consensus of $20.00 and then Nintendo decided to just run with it to compete against the higher cost of MS and PS services.
Internet should have tried to bargain more. Maybe we could have got it down to Nintendo paying us $20.00 a year to use their voice app.