After having already completed 10 years since its launch, Nintendo has started the countdown to say goodbye to the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, two of their most widely supported consoles, given their great popularity in Japan. And it is that in a publication on its official website, the Japanese company has just announced that the eShop will stop offering support for both consoles from next March 2023.
This means owners of consoles including Nintendo 3DS and 3DS XL, Nintendo 2DS and 2DS XL, Nintendo Wii U and Wii U Deluxe will no longer be able to make purchases on Nintendo eShop.
Thus, in order to sweeten this goodbye, the company has made a web page available to users with which they can create statistics tables with details such as their most used games, the number of hours invested, favorite categories, and others.
However, unlike what we saw with other consoles such as Sony’s PSP Vita, Nintendo wanted to make it clear that even after both eShops disappear, “and for the foreseeable future”, users will be able to re-download games they have already purchased and even buy DLCs for currently existing games, receive software updates for both consoles, and even continue to use the online gaming features.
And it is that although it was an expected closure given the antiquity and low popularity of these consoles today, there is still a good segment of affected users. A demand that Kotaku exposed in a small interview with the company, fueling the topic of whether or not there is an “obligation” to keep securities alive on older platforms, as well as other hot topics of the services of these online stores.
For its part, Nintendo stated that “there are currently over 130 classic games available in growing libraries for various legacy systems“, referring to the current Switch Online service. And it is that in fact the company has ensured that currently «has no plans to offer classic content in other ways«, focusing its backward compatibility plans on the cloud.
