Well, It’s eShop Doomsday… Again (Updated)
Yet another digital doomsday has arrived, this time in the form of the Nintendo eShop for 3DS and Wii U, which Nintendo will retire early on March 27th. March 26th will be the last full day that that both shops will remain active.
In fact, it’s already too late for a select group. It was no longer possible to use a credit or debit card to add funds to the eShops as of May 23rd last year, and was too late to add funds through a Nintendo eShop Card as of August 29th. [Note from Drew Young: “Protip: If you have a Switch, and have merged your Nintendo wallets, then your Wii U and 3DS can access funds added to your wallet on the Switch.] It was also too late for anyone to buy Fire Emblem Fates after the end of February, for presumed licensing reasons. Nintendo forced everyone to plan carefully for this ill-fated over several months.
It still sucks that this is happening, and it’s not even the first time. The phasing out of the Wii and DS Shop Channels was comparatively unceremonious, considering the lower number of games available on those systems’ digital storefronts compared to their successors. But not that much lower if you include the sheer number of Virtua Console games released on Wii, several of which were never made available for Wii U and couldn’t be transferred.
Make no mistake: What’s happening with the 3DS and Wii U eShops is orders of magnitude worse. Only smaller and retro games were sold through Wii and DS. Every game was released digitally on 3DS and Wii U, including big-budget games, those from indie developers, and retro games through the Virtual Consoles. The massive number of games that will vanish into digital ether in mere days cannot be overstated. Nintendo is dealing a devastating blow to video game preservation efforts, and they couldn’t be bothered to care about it.
Several publishers wisely discounted their games so the audience could purchase them for lower prices, since, well, they weren’t making much money off them by this point anyway. Capcom and Sega/Atlus (especially the latter company for the last one there) were exemplary at this, with games like Resident Evil Revelations (on both 3DS and Wii U) and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney — Spirit of Justice from the former and the Shin Megami Tensei IV titles and the Etrian Odyssey titles from the latter. Other third-party publishers were generally good at discounting their titles on occasion.
Of course Nintendo couldn’t be bothered to discount anything. I haven’t the faintest clue from memory of the last time they held a sale for 3DS and Wii U titles that weren’t part of their Nintendo Selects line on both eShops. Nintendo has always been terrible at reducing their software prices, on a temporary and especially permanently basis, and can never be bothered to do so with platforms for which they’ve phased out support. This is bad enough, but it’s still worse that they’re taking the eShops and crushing them into small pixelated pieces within their figurative gloved hands.
Not all these games need to be lost now. This, right now, is the time for publishers to port games that will be lost on these platforms. This goes for plenty of Nintendo-published 3DS games (that they could have put on sale) like The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds and both Luigi’s Mansion games, and too many more. Only a few Wii U games count here, like the remasters of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess and Xenoblade Chronicles X. There weren’t many third-party games on Wii U that weren’t on other platforms, but several 3DS titles were exclusive to the platform. Atlus porting the Etrian Odyssey games to Switch and Steam inspires hope that even games that supposedly required dual-screened setups to work can be adjusted for other platforms.
In the meantime: You, the owners of the two platforms, have every right to hack your systems and pirate the software on it. If Nintendo can’t be bothered to maintain servers and create a virtual hell on Earth for software archivists, someone has to continue making these games available. Don’t discount the possibility of Nintendo continuing to throw out random and occasional firmware upgrades and patches for the consoles and games, respectively, but hopefully homebrew communities can continue to find ways around that.
Even if porting starts happening by the bulk from publishers, it will nonetheless be terrible that Nintendo took the extreme step to suddenly silence downloads on two platforms which, let’s be honest, aren’t that old. Hopefully the options to redownload old games doesn’t suddenly disappear for months on end without a word from Nintendo, like what happened to DS and Wii last year. We should be at a point where publishers can be trusted to preserve their old software, and though all of them have issues, Nintendo continues to be the worst among them. The only saving grace is how these systems have been hacked to hell and back, so there’s a way to take it to them.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
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The PlayStation 3 is still getting firmware updates, and this always breaks homebrew efforts for a day or two. I wouldn’t put it past Nintendo to keep patching out exploits for a while even though there’s absolutely no point to doing so.
Oh, I definitely expect them to put out updates and patches for some games for “security exploits,” maybe even in the next couple of months. It’s going to be wild when they maintain that, but not the eShop servers.