By now, you are more than likely aware that the eShops for Nintendo’s Wii U and 3DS consoles were not going to be up for much longer. Nintendo had originally announced the closures of the 2 eShops last summer, including the closure date of March 27th.
Well, the date has arrived and, sadly, the closures have now officially happened. Although Nintendo has not publicly announced it anywhere on social media, people have been going to the 2 eShops and have discovered that, indeed, they can no longer purchase anything from them. There is either an error message, or the store has no games to purchase. It’s the end of an era. That all said, if you were planning on buying anything before the eShops closed down, hopefully, you were able to do so.
Source: Wii U & 3DS eShops
F
Yeah, I was broke this last week and a half. Luckily I managed to get Attack of the Friday Monster.
Well, it was fun while lasted. We had some amazing memories on those consoles. Can’t believe the time has finally come.
Did they really kill off the Poke Transporter without saying it would be affected? Inb4 someone replying something about “it doesn’t matter” because I dared to criticize anything Pokemon related.
… Is it dead? Because I was told as long as you already have it downloaded it would still work.
You need an active bank subscription, which wasn’t known until today.
arn’t they making all its services free?
Nope, if you try to transfer Pokemon without a bank subscription you’re only going to get a message saying “subscribe to use”. Bank still works, but gens 1 – 5 have been basically cut off from gen 6+ now.
Seems like both of them will no longer be used.
It not being usable appears to have been an error, which has been resolved since last night
I never really scrolled through the Wii U eShop like I did with the Wii Shop Channel and 3DS eShop. Today, before it shut down, I decided to scroll through the Wii U’s eShop just for fun, and I realized something while doing so:
Man, the U’s eShop was so lively compared to Switch’s. I mean, I knew that 3DS had fun music and atmosphere, but so did the Wii U. Comparing that to Switch, and suddenly I realize that the Switch’s main marketing ploy about the Switch having games really is true- but it only has the games, and none of that same charm the other two stores had.
Dare I say it, I had fun looking through the Wii U’s eShop during its twilight hours. I had fun in a digital store front. I could never say that about the Switch eShop.
The “spirit” of the eShop is dead, just like the Wii Shop Channel a few years back. The Switch eShop is just another app store…
The end of an era indeed. I already got most of the 3DS & VC titles I wanted a long time ago, there are only like three or four games I will have to live without.
So crazy that they closed the shops already. Neither of the other Big 3 would have gotten away with it from a PR perspective.
Depends. The PS3’s store got closed after 15 years. looking at how more successful that console was, this seems about right to me.
Sony decided against closing the PS3 store after negative feedback. It’s still open.
Thanks for sharing
I watched GameXplain’s final hour stream and saw the shops go down live. I have to admit, I shed a tear or two.
We didn’t just lose a shop- we lost a library. Sure, you can still find some of those games on other platforms or as physical copies, but for many of them, they’re just lost media now, and with how unique the 3DS and Wii U platforms were with how the gameplay was split between two screens, who knows if any of those games will ever see life on a later console.
I must have spent hours this weekend scrolling through both eShops, contemplating every single game, deciding which ones I wanted to make sure I had access to. I took into account whether the game had such mechanics that porting would be difficult or outright impossible, and in the case of Virtual Console, which games were likely to be added to the NSO apps or not. I opened the Switch eShop several times just to keep adding funds, jumping right back onto the 3DS and Wii U shops to continue my browsing.
Well, my final purchases had to conclude eventually. Among them were Fire Emblem Echoes, Ocarina of Time 3D, Pokemon Crystal, Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story + Bowser Jr.’s Journey, Zack & Wiki, Mario Super Sluggers, Affordable Space Adventures, Crash & the Boys Street Challenge, Hogan’s Alley, Wild Gunman, RE4 Wii Edition, and Metroid: Samus Returns (somehow lost my physical copy when I moved a few years ago). I even allocated most of my Wii U’s internal memory to the Xenoblade Chronicles X performance patches, moving nearly everything else to a flash drive
I don’t know that I am 100% satisfied with my final splurge, but at least I stuck it out to the finish, and I hope many of us here were able to do the same.
Unfortunately the eshop was down much much earlier on my console, it was down at 2pm U.K. time, so I couldn’t enjoy its final hours, it was supposed to be down at 1am the day after. I was just met with an error message stopping me from going on the eshop very distressing, especially since I was on the eshop a couple of days ago.
Time to emulate the stuff no longer available on my Steam Deck 😎