Mario Run had a major flaw for me. It would have been the perfect subway commute game, but it required an internet connection to play. I'm still baffled why Nintendo made this design mistake; they excluded a large market.
Here in Tokyo I've not encountered an issue with signal on the metro yet. I had big issues back in London but since moving to Japan 2 years ago it's never been a problem. I've seen similar oversights by Japanese companies when it comes to disregarding or just not really understanding things from a Western perspective so it could be as simple as that.
The London Underground doesn't have 4G/Wifi in the tunnels. As with most things with the tube, the reason is that the infrastructure is very old and installing extra equipment inside those old, narrow and twisty tunnels is quite difficult and expensive.
My guess would be that they just never considered that there would be first world countries without cheap mobile data everywhere.
When I was living in Asia, even in poorer countries and/or rural areas, there was mobile internet. $1/mo for 4G 1GB. People took it for granted at a level that would be impossible in Germany, because here you can still be without even 3G just a few km outside of city centers.
Also, mobile internet repeaters for tunnels are a solved problem. Singapore had no offline areas in their underground metro. Germany has lots of em.
> mobile internet repeaters for tunnels are a solved problem.
True. Unfortunately in Canada (Toronto at least) the big 4 telco oligopoly can't agree on pricing for this one. The result is a single company offers subway coverage!
Nevermind that data here is more expensive than even the US.
Where's that Silicon Valley disruption spirit for the telco oligopolies worldwide?
I remember one of the reason was because of software piracy. On iOS it shouldn't be required since you cant install anything other than from App Store anyway. And so to make it fair for both iOS platform and Android platform they had it on.
