Nintendo Is Pulling A Ton Of Its Own Content Forever

Nintendo has announced that it will be closing the online eShops for their Wii U and 3DS consoles in 2023 - but that doesn’t mean you’ve a whole year to keep buying Virtual Console classics.

Nintendo has said that these eShops will close in late March 2023 - but how you pay for games on these stores will change far sooner than that. So if you’re keen to get some Game Boy Advance bangers like Golden Sun and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap on your Wii U, or SNES essentials like Super Metroid and EarthBound on your 3DS (the best handheld console of all time, of course), you’d better get a move on.

The full statement, as reported on Nintendo Life, tells players that credit card functionality on the Wii U and 3DS eshop will stop on May 23 2022 - so that’s only three months from now. After that, Nintendo eShop Cards - so, those little credit gift cards - will cease to work on August 29 2022. Players then have until March 2023 to redeem any outstanding download codes.

After March 2023, Nintendo says redownloading games will still be possible. Online play and software updates will also continue. But once those shops close, that means game over for a number of games that simply are not playable elsewhere, officially, right now. Nintendo even adds in its statement: “We currently have no plans to offer classic content in other ways.”

Which is to say that games exclusive to the Wii U and 3DS will become unavailable once the eShops close. No more Rhythm Heaven Megamix on 3DS. No more Xenoblade Chronicles X on Wii U. Digitally, anyway - though surely this move willforce up the price for physical copies. There are eShop-exclusive Kirby titles which will vanish, and in certain parts of the world even fairly high-profile 3DS titles, like the excellent Picross 3D: Round 2, were only ever made available digitally. So, bye bye to those. Uh, all those M2-developed SEGA 3D games? They’re not all available as a physical release in Europe, so I guess it’s buy now or face up to costly Japanese imports.

One way to play some Nintendo classics, and OWN them, is on the Classic Mini SNES - assuming you can find one.

What really, really sucks here of course is that there’s still no Virtual Console on Switch. So while you can play a lot of the NES, SNES and N64 games that are available on the Wii U eShop on the Switch, that’s only via the Switch Online subscription service - you don’t actually own them. It’s cool to have EarthBound on Switch, finally - but you can own it on 3DS. Hopefully these eShop closures will see a Switch Virtual Console appear - but do any of us really feel confident about that? Also, buy a Wii U, already.