The Shutdown Of The Wii Shop

Nintendo announced back in 2017 that in 2019 the Wii shop would be shutting down, a process which would in effect mark the end of the life span of the Nintendo Wii.

Right now we’re in the middle of this process. Back in March of 2018 the ability to purchase and add Wii Points to your account (well, really console) ended, but users could still spend remaining points on applications, games, what have you, until January 31st 2019.

Well, that day has come and gone and Nintendo did indeed shut down the shop. While one can still download previous purchases, the shop now lists nothing as available for purchase.

In the upcoming months, the ability to download previous purchases will be removed, presumably as Nintendo finally shuts down those servers for good, and when that day comes I’ll consider the Nintendo Wii truly dead, barring Ubisoft releasing another new Just Dance title for it or some other strange occurrence.

Honestly, I feel like this should have come earlier than it did. While the Wii was replaced with the Wii U back in 2012, the Wii maintained a solid life during the years following this, as far as game releases and console sales went.

The problem is Nintendo began shutting down services for it around this same time – WiiConnect24 was shut down in 2013, and 2014 would see most Wii titles online features become disabled — one title which sticks out to me is Mario Kart 8 which oddly was still being sold new for $40 USD in stores up until this past year from what I’d seen!

Other services as well, like Netflix, dropped Wii support in this same time period, giving fewer and fewer options for what you could do with the Wii online.

To have the Wii Shop hold on as long as it did, by comparison, is somewhat impressive and atypical of how Nintendo treated the Wii in most other online respects. Now, I personally feel the online game features should have stuck around longer and that they and the Wii Shop services should have been closed more towards 2016-2017 range, but that’s just me. Given the relative failure that the Wii U was as a console and the different way in which the Switch handles online shopping, I guess Nintendo wanted to keep Virtual Console software available for as long as possible until the Switch was well enough entrenched in the Nintendo player base to be safe to fully transition over to as the main place to play classic games.

That’s really the big loss here – games available only as WiiWare will no longer be playable easily to those who don’t already have them. Sure, there’s the loss of the library of Virtual Console games on the Wii, but it isn’t like most of us don’t already have ways to play those games, or won’t be able to purchase them via other methods in the future. Still, there are ways around everything…

It should be noted that the shutdown of the Wii Shop also affects the Wii mode on the Wii U but does not affect the consoles native Nintendo eShop service.

That’s really all I have to say regarding this closure — it was a long time coming but we’re finally at the end of an era of gaming that just seems to have refused to die. Most people who owned Wii’s long ago gave them up, selling them to game stores or outright donating them to places like Goodwill, and outside of gamers who either really love the system itself, Nintendo, or just enjoy such this was really an event they wouldn’t even notice.

For those curious though, the software isn’t lost — I do believe most, if not nearly all of it has been archived, and can be found if one hunts and knows what to do with the data, but that’s as far as I will touch on this subject here, at least for now.

More to come, as always.