Kiss DS/Wii Online Goodbye

[FoxNtd]

Just saw this in a random Japanese chat tonight.

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/in...2014/0227.html

The article politely thanks everyone for their continued support and long-term usage of their services but they have announced the termination of service for May 20 2014. It does not make any reference to regions so it is not clear if this is exclusively Japan's region only, or worldwide.

For amusement I saw comments in the chat about this such as "campaign to force Wii U" and "Nintendo sucks" so it seems they have a bad taste in their mouths about it just like, well, the rest of the world probably will.

EDIT: Courtesy of the post below, worldwide discontinuation has been confirmed.

[Jorpho]

Well, shucky darns. It'd be nice if someone figured out how to replicate the servers, but then that's what people keep hoping for every time an MMO shuts down, and I don't think it's ever happened.

EDIT: Global shutdown confirmed.

I forgot how much Pokemon depended on the Internet. I guess now I know what I'll be doing for the next few months.

[buzz_n64]

I assume this would render playing Wii game Online on your Wii U useless. Well, that's another feature to be lost on the Wii U.

[LordsOfSkulls]

Just saw this in a random Japanese chat tonight.

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/in...2014/0227.html

The article politely thanks everyone for their continued support and long-term usage of their services but they have announced the termination of service for May 20 2014. It does not make any reference to regions so it is not clear if this is exclusively Japan's region only, or worldwide.

For amusement I saw comments in the chat about this such as "campaign to force Wii U" and "Nintendo sucks" so it seems they have a bad taste in their mouths about it just like, well, the rest of the world probably will.

See this why as a gamer i dont agree with "I get only games with Multiplayer" people. Cause within few years you cant play the game you love and gotten for multiplayer.

And reason i stick to going for the "Awesome" Single Player Experience >.> so i can experience it at any time or Split Screen/Co=Ops.


Also their was not that many games that used Multiplayer that are still popular among people for DS/Wii other than maybe like Mario Kart/Smash Bros

[NeoVenom]

It's sad but then again they did say that the Virtual Console store will still be up. A lot of Wii's game are single player games, as mentioned before, and not many games used the online multiplayer feature. I can see people who played Brawl and Mario Kart Wii getting upset though.

[kupomogli]

It's sad but then again they did say that the Virtual Console store will still be up. A lot of Wii's game are single player games, as mentioned before, and not many games used the online multiplayer feature. I can see people who played Brawl and Mario Kart Wii getting upset though.

There are games though that have no 3DS or Wii U equivalent. Once the servers shut down, games like Advance Wars Days of Ruin, Jump Ultimate Stars, and Clubhouse Games won't have a 3DS or Wii U equivalent. It doesn't take a lot to keep servers running, but all because Nintendo wants to force people still playing Mario Kart DS/Wii or Brawl, etc, to move onto the next gen, they fuck the rest of the community that plays an online game every once in awhile.

[Atarileaf]

Does this mean no more netflix through the wii? I have it on PS3 but for some reason it doesn't work right - always gets to 25% and stops.

[NeoVenom]

There are games though that have no 3DS or Wii U equivalent. Once the servers shut down, games like Advance Wars Days of Ruin, Jump Ultimate Stars, and Clubhouse Games won't have a 3DS or Wii U equivalent. It doesn't take a lot to keep servers running, but all because Nintendo wants to force people still playing Mario Kart DS/Wii or Brawl, etc, to move onto the next gen, they fuck the rest of the community that plays an online game every once in awhile.

Yeah, it's messed up, I agree with that. They can't use the excuse that the DS and Wii are old because the 360 and PS3 are both almost a decade old and you can connect online with them still. Yeah, their next gen consoles are out and are still rather fresh compared to the Wii U but a lot of people are probably going to wait a while before getting Xbox One or PS4. My only question is why Nintendo didn't make the Wii U use the same servers as the Wii? That way people who still want to go online with the Wii can still have that option. For example, Xbox 360 and Xbox One uses Xbox Live, PS3 and PS4 uses PSN.

EDIT: Like they can add DS and Wii to the Nintendo Network since both 3DS and Wii U use it.

[Tanooki]

It's just the online server, probably given the date they want to get rid of the overhead before the new Kart and Brawl games pop up for stability reasons and to help peddle that more. The writing was on the wall the moment they made unified accounts and left the dead systems off the list, same with the point cards that wont work on them too. People should consider themselves lucky they can still get points for them and buy games added to the services. They're a waste to have around as it's time to move forward, but it also makes anyone aware the failure of the download happy market lemmings will face -- shut doors and closed away from things if your hardware fails.

[Leo_A]

Does this mean no more netflix through the wii? I have it on PS3 but for some reason it doesn't work right - always gets to 25% and stops.

The video streaming and the Wii Shop (Where you download the video streaming apps and purchase/redownload Virtual Console/WiiWare games) are all that will remain online on the Wii after this.

And the internet browser still works (In the technical sense, it was awful when it new and today's more bloated websites are usually too much for it now), but I don't think they have any way to shut that down once you've downloaded it.

So Netflix is safe for now and probably will be the primary reason why the Wii Shop stays online. I suspect once Netflix updates things someday and breaks compatibility with the Wii that that will be when the Wii Shop goes away.

[kupomogli]

Nintendo isn't going to drop the Wii shop. They don't care if you play games online, but they care about you buying their overpriced games.

[JSoup]

They can't use the excuse that the DS and Wii are old because the 360 and PS3 are both almost a decade old and you can connect online with them still.

Different situation with those two. Not sure about the 360, but the PS3 connects directly to the server of the online game you're trying to play. This is why pretty much every PS3 game that has online is still playable online, most of the servers for those games are still running. Wii routes to a privately owned Nintendo run server first, then to the server of the game you're trying to play online.

[Leo_A]

You're greatly mistaken for most instances. The vast majority of PS3 multiplayer enabled releases rely on publisher ran dedicated servers which is why so many PS3 titles are already offline where as the vast majority of 360 releases outside of EA rely on P2P and don't require publishers to setup any online infrastructure to support their titles.

I can fire up most any non EA 360 game dating to 2005 and still play online. But on the PS3, much is already offline. Oftentimes as a result, 360 versions remain online to this day like Outrun Coast 2 Coast from Sega or Grid from Codemasters years after the PS3 version that relied on company ran dedicated servers has been taken offline to reallocate those server resources to newer releases.

If it's on 360 and isn't EA published, odds are it's P2P and nothing exist for the company to discontinue at their end since the player's host their own servers (And Microsoft's generic Xbox Live framework handles the matchmaking). On the PS3, odds are it relies on publisher ran dedicated servers rather than P2P (And even those with P2P, the publisher most allocate their own resources for matchmaking).

If I was to venture a guess, 90% of online enabled 360 releases remain able to be played online with few non EA exceptions like Test Drive Unlimited where as the PS3 percentage is going to be closer to 50% with a long list of games that are offline that can still be played online in their 360 form.

Nintendo isn't going to drop the Wii shop. They don't care if you play games online, but they care about you buying their overpriced games.

I doubt they're moving a lot of digital sales these days for the Wii. It matters so much that there was more money in it for Nintendo to drop online support entirely from the Wii than it was to retain the additional hardware in order to preserve that ability to make digital purchases.

And backwards compatibility for the insignificant Wii U will only matter less as time goes by. An awful lot of the most dedicated segment of Nintendo console fans already have their Wii U and have already transferred that content over and have it present on their Wii U. Much of the value of the Wii U having access to the Wii Shop has thus already been fulfilled.

I predict when the day comes that Netflix no longer supports the Wii, the end of the Wii Shop won't be far away. If a significant number of Wii owners continue to use it for Netflix like I'm guessing is the case, there's incentive there to maintain the online shop to preserve access to downloading the app itself.

[JSoup]

You're greatly mistaken for most instances. The vast majority of PS3 multiplayer enabled releases rely on publisher ran dedicated servers which is why so many PS3 titles are already offline

That was the difference I was getting at between PS3 and Wii. PS3 games are pretty much up to the whim of the developer and the Wii is at the mercy of Nintendo. One is a situation shut down, the other is a culling. As the state of online for the majority of PS3 games, I fully admit I was guessing. I tend to not enjoy online multiplayer games, so I can only guess from the few that I own. Of them, only two can't be played online anymore (Ghostbusters and White Knight Chronicles).

[Leo_A]

The Wii is the same way as the PS3. The publisher must host their own online services.

There just happens to not be any more 3rd party releases left to be discontinued since Nintendo's own was all that was left [Edit: Not sure if that's the case, just saw a list somewhere else and a lot of 3rd party games are listed as part of this shutdown]. I'm admittedly not sure about 1-2 games in that DS/Wii list, but everything else was definitely Nintendo published.

Most online DS/Wii games like Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 slowly went years ago like PS3 games do as publishers big and small reallocate their online infrastructure to better support newer releases. I suspect the day way in the future with the plug is finally pulled on the PS3 that its list won't look much different with most games left being 1st/2nd party releases.

Or maybe not... Gran Turismo 5 was just announced for discontinuance, is a 1st party release, isn't terribly old at just a bit over 3 years, is one of the best selling titles on the platform, still has a thriving online component, and remains widely available new at retail to this day. Still rather puzzled by that. I could understand when GT6 experiences a price drop or two since it essentially retains all GT5 content, but not at this time when it's still a $60 game and GT5XL is $20 or less.

[Greg2600]

There are a HUGE number of Mario Kart Wii players still out there. It's a very active game online, this will infuriate a lot of people. That game just requires matching servers, there's not that much overhead there. This is horse poo poo.

[kupomogli]

Gran Turismo 5 was discontinued to force those owners to purchase Gran Turismo 6. It's better to get $60 from people who still want to play online rather than them playing online while waiting for GT6 to drop to $20 before purchasing it.

If Nintendo wanted to force Mario Kart fans to go over to the Wii U, then why not just close Mario Kart servers for those games instead of the entire online infrastructure. It's like Nintendo thinks everyone is too stupid to realize that's the reason why they've closed the servers when they did. They're not going to say the reason they've did it is to force Mario Kart fans to purchase a 3DS or Wii U, that'd get a lot more backlash than we just want to cut the servers off for no reason.

It's really not a big issue to me except that I was planning on playing two of those games online again. Advance Wars Days of Ruin and Jump Ultimate Stars. Now unless I get on and play the games now, putting some new games I've purchased in my backlog, I'm going to lose my chance.

This is the reason that I don't want the current gen to be mostly online only. You'll put a lot of time into a game only for the online to be pulled and you're screwed out of what you may or may not have paid $60 for.

[Jorpho]

I only just found out about the Mario Kart Wii tournaments that do fancy things like let you race a Wiggler on Wario's Gold Mine. That seems like a loss.

I don't really care all that much about online play, since there's always someone out there who is tremendously better than you, if not someone who is just flat-out cheating. But Pokemon – without online trading, you're kind of stuck if you want to finish those.

At least Professor Layton's "downloadables" are trivially unlocked with the right save data.

Every time an MMO shuts down, it seems like someone desperately hopes to get some kind of open-source server clone going, but never gets anywhere. I wonder if this might turn out differently? It is just a matching service, after all.

[Niku-Sama]

man I never played an epic fortune street session online....that's all I can say other than not being able to do general things online with the wii that weren't game related....
well crap what about Netflix on the regular wii? I imagine that will stop aswell?
man I am gonna have a bunch of pissed off dumb as bricks customers come yell at me about their problems they are having with their wii like it was something I did.

you'da thought in this day and age that regular people would figure out by now that these things have a finite life and services end eventually along with newer versions coming out....

[Press_Start]

Nintendo isn't going to drop the Wii shop. They don't care if you play games online, but they care about you buying their overpriced games.

Overpriced my @ss!

You tell me where in the world you can buy Super Mario RPG for $8 dollars?! Super Mario 3 (a $15 game) for 5 bucks. And a treasure trove of rare Turbo Grafx/CD/Super CD games worth $60-$110 a piece for $6-8 a pop.

At the least when I download them I'm getting a complete game and it's helluva lot cheaper than spending $30-40 on dlc, map packs, and costume sets for every incomplete PS3/360 game.