The online shop on the Nintendo Wii is being shut down in an oddly long phase out over 2018 and 2019. For those who don’t know, or have forgotten, the Nintendo Wii shop was a feature of the console where you could buy additional software (Wiiware, as it was known) for the console, as well as classic games for its built in emulation system known as the Virtual Console, which, at the time, was taken as “revolutionary” by much of the gaming community.
Of course, the Wii launched in late 2006, meaning this shop has been active in full strength for over a decade now, and has continued while Nintendo has released 2 successors to the console – the Wii U and the Switch.
Honestly, this almost feels overdue. I have to give props to Nintendo for keeping the service active for as long as they have when they have shut down a majority of other services rather suddenly, rendering the online features of the Wii pretty much pointless shortly after the WiiU was released.
The time table is rather crazy though: per this post on Nintendo UK:
- You will no longer be able to add points (read: money) to the Wii Shop channel on March 26th, 2018
- You will no longer be able to spend points to make a purchase after January 31st, 2019
- You will no longer be able to download any prior purchases or access the shop sometime later in 2019.
So, this gives us over a year of a sort of zombie status for the Wii Shop. This *does* affect Wii U owners as well, as the Wii mode in the Wii U uses the same shop infrastructure and as such will suffer the same loss of usability due to this shutdown.
The Wii U will also be affected by this shutdown – for the Wii mode only, of course.
We can only imagine Nintendo will roll out a full-featured Virtual Console option on the Switch in the upcoming year – it would be nice too if they gave you a way to transfer purchases to the Switch, but I have a feeling they will negate such, as they tend to do.
In any case, while this doesn’t affect many of us due to us having modded our Wii consoles, this does create an issue in some modifications using the Wii Shop, and Nintendo’s servers, to grab certain software. I can imagine all the important data is backed up by enthusiasts, but I do have to wonder if, following this last service shutdown on the Wii if there won’t be a slight revival in interest in modifying the console.
Those of us with modded Wii consoles won’t miss out on much following this.
Probably not, but if it does happen, cool. I’ve always liked the hardware, I just didn’t like actually playing the thing.
So, if you’ve really been wanting Chrono Trigger or something else on the Wii but have been putting it off, now might be the time to buy it.