When Nintendo announced that they were discontinuing their popular handheld, the Nintendo 3DS, we knew that it was essentially the end of an era, as it has more or less been supplanted by the dominant Nintendo Switch. Despite this, Nintendo was planning on continuing to repair the 3DS and the 3DS XL in their native Japan until the end of March, until something unexpected happened. As reported by 4Games and translated by Siliconera, the company has announced that they will be ending the repair service for the Nintendo 3DS family line effective immediately due to running out of spare parts, roughly three weeks before it was supposed to conclude.
According to the post, the final batches of 3DS and 3DS XL systems that were received by the company at the time of this announcement will be the final ones to be repaired and will no longer accept future ones. In late February when they announced the ending of the repair service, Nintendo stated that it was initially ending due to the arduous task of securing parts for the repair process, something that was forewarned as a potential to end it early. It looks like the foresight by Nintendo was spot on, as they ended up running out of parts well before the planned end date.
While this is a disappointing situation, it’s not all that unexpected considering that the company has essentially moved onto the Switch, which is absolutely demolishing the gaming market at this time. There’s also the report of a newer Switch model, which will more than likely result in a serious statistical increase for Nintendo in future quarters. For those living in Japan, Nintendo is still accepting the later iterations for repair, which include the New 3DS, New 3DS XL, and the 2DS models, although we don’t know for how much longer.