Nintendo has announced that the eShop for both the Wii U and the 3DS will be discontinued as of next year.
As of next year, late March 2023, users will no longer be able to make purchases on either the Nintendo Wii U or 3DS eShop. Announcing the news on Twitter, Nintendo provided a link going into more detail, as well as answering a few questions.
From May 23, 2022, you will not be able to add funds via a credit card on the Wii U and 3DS eShop. And from August 29, 2022, you will not be able to use a Nintendo eShop card to add funds on the two consoles. But you will still be able to redeem download codes until late March 2023. And you will still be able to download games and DLC you have already purchased for the foreseeable future.
In the Q&A section, in response to why it is doing this, Nintendo wrote: “This is part of the natural lifecycle for any product line as it becomes less used by consumers over time.”
Importantly, there is a section of the Q&A that Nintendo decided to remove after the announcement. Frank Cifaldi, video game historian, screenshotted the deleted text. It reads, “Once it is no longer possible to purchase software in Nintendo eShop on Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS family of systems, many classic games for past platforms will cease to be available to purchase anywhere.
“Will you make classic games available to own some other way? If not, then why? Doesn’t Nintendo have an obligation to preserve its classic games by continually making them available for purchase?”
Nintendo then proceeded to justify their decision by noting Nintendo Switch Online having the selection of SNES and NES games. The final line of the answer reads “We have no plans to offer classic content in other ways.”
why is this a problem?
The problem with this is that it will obviously encourage piracy. There are some games that are literally only available as digital downloads on the 3DS. One example is Attack of the Friday Monsters. Once the eShop is gone, this game will not be legally playable at all.
Nintendo is notorious for taking ROM distributors and hackers to court. Only recently was hacker Bowser sentenced to three years in prison, and owes millions in fines.
It’s ridiculous that Nintendo is making this decision, yet isn’t offering an alternative. A similar thing happened with PlayStation last year. But Nintendo aren’t likely to respond to backlash in the same way.
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Featured Image Credit: Nintendo