It’s the end of an era. Back in February, Nintendo announced that it would be sunsetting the eShop applications on the 3DS and Wii U consoles, intending to fully terminate them in March 2023. Panicked Nintendo fans returned to these services en masse to download exclusive titles that may be otherwise inaccessible in the very near future. Unfortunately, using the soon-to-be-severed service is about to become quite a bit more difficult, as Nintendo will disable the use of credit and debit cards on the 3DS and Wii U eShops on May 23.
Sadly, this is par-for-the-course for Nintendo, as it took similar measures to disable the Wii Shop Channel and the DSi Shop in 2019 before seemingly shuttering the servers altogether a few months ago. It’s worth noting that this change was already implemented in Japan in January of this year, and, while North American gamers will still be able to make purchases via credits transferred from Nintendo eShop cards, this will be phased out in late August.
At a glance, Nintendo has had an excellent track record of late, publishing major hits such as Pokemon Legends: Arceus and Kirby and the Forgotten Land, greatly expanding the Nintendo Switch Online service, and helping the Nintendo Switch to crack the one-hundred million global sales mark. That said, decisions such as these tend to leave sour tastes in the mouths of dedicated fans, and, should this trend continue in an all-digital future, it seems as if many games published on Nintendo-owned platforms will be doomed to obsolescence.
Video game preservation has become a major topic of discussion in recent years. As older hardware becomes tougher to maintain and newer digital services go defunct, hundreds upon hundreds of quality titles run the risk of being permanently lost. It’s hard to know exactly how many worthwhile games were made inaccessible to the public when the Wii Shop Channel closed, but Nintendo’s blase attitude toward archiving, combined with its quirky proprietary tech that isn’t easily emulated, makes for a looming preservation nightmare.
It’s no secret that Nintendo absolutely detests unregulated emulation. Constantly at war with sites that host ROMs of old NES, SNES, and N64 titles and going so far as to take down YouTube videos that show Steam Deck owners how to emulate retro Nintendo hardware on Valve’s new device, the publisher’s hardline stance against this practice adds another wrinkle to preservation efforts. While emulation has existed in a legal gray area for quite some time, with more digital games on Nintendo platforms going up in smoke, it may soon be the only alternative.
Source: Nintendo Customer Support