It’s the day that longtime Nintendo fans have been dreading for well over year. On Monday, 3/27/2023, at approximately 5:00 PM PDT, the very much beloved Nintendo 3DS and Wii U eShop stores were officially closed. As result of this, players can no longer make purchases on the store, download free content, or utilize any of the features or services that the shop had been offering during its tenure. The end of the shop had been a well-known fact, but the dedicated Nintendo fan base is still mourning one of the company’s most treasured online services. Many have taken to Twitter to say farewell to the 3DS and Wii U eShop and all of the titles that were offered solely through it.
It’s important to note that while you will no longer be able to purchase any title from either store, you can still re-download titles that you’ve already purchased at any time. However, if that title has any DLC that you do not own, then you will no longer have the option to acquire it. Leading up to the shutdown of the store, many fans have been stockpiling downloadable title, specifically ones that were only available on the service and nowhere else. The most famous example of this is YouTube personality Jirard Khalil, also known as The Completionist, who purchased every single digital title from both the 3DS and Wii U eShop. This reportedly cost him a staggering $23,000.
The purchases ramped up these past couple of months, as we inched closer and closer to the ill-fated date of the shutdown. As we mentioned earlier, Nintendo warned of the aforementioned shutdown in February 2022, giving players a little more than a year to do anything and everything with the eShop until then. Nintendo began the sunsetting process in May 2022, removing the ability to add funds into an account with a credit card. This was further emphasized in August when they removed the ability to add funds with a Nintendo eShop Card.
In the Q&A section of Nintendo’s support post, they state that “This is part of the natural lifecycle for any product line as it becomes less used by consumers over time.” While this may be true in the ever-changing video game market, the end of the 3DS and Wii U eShop feels like an especially harder loss to take. For many years, both offered alternative options to the fairly saturated AAA market, which in and of itself has evolved to give smaller studios the chance to break through to the mainstream. It’s the end of an era, and even though the fans will continue forward with the next Nintendo service they bring out, the impact that the 3DS and Wii U shop had on the players will never be forgotten.