Back when the Wii U launched in 2012, the console came with many new, built-in features. One such feature, the Miiverse, was a social network for gamers that used the Wii U. With the halting of production for the console, and the lack of future Miiverse support on the Nintendo Switch, the platform was all but on death’s door, and as of November 8th, the Miiverse has officially shut down.
Users can no longer post, read, or access anything linking through to the Miiverse website or platform. Any pieces of artwork, although inaccessible at the moment, will not be lost for long. “After Miiverse service has ended, an e-mail notification that includes the URL to download your post history will be sent to the e-mail address registered to your Nintendo Account,” says Nintendo. With such a high volume of emails needing to be sent out, the company also expects emails to take a few weeks to reach all users. In addition, the download link will not be delivered to any emails associated with a user’s Nintendo Network ID. Unfortunately, no text posts were saved for download and are now lost forever.
With the shutdown of the Miiverse, games like Splatoon can no longer upload or display drawings in game. This integrated feature for Splatoon was used to view recent players’ drawings while out in the game’s plaza. Fret not, for this feature is still in Splatoon 2 with it having its own independent system for displaying posts created by other players. Although the Miiverse is gone, online gameplay for Splatoon and other Wii U games should not be interrupted as a result.
The final hours of Miiverse were spent with players submitting drawings to mourn the upcoming loss of the platform. Once the service came to a close, Nintendo unveiled a mosaic image composed of thousands of Miiverse posts as a last hurrah for the short-lived social network.