Wii can't believe it
Nintendo Wii and DSi Shop channels have been offline for days
It appears that Nintendo has quietly closed two of its legacy storefronts, and it took the larger gaming community almost a week to notice.
The Nintendo Wii will be old enough to vote in some countries later this year, but the console's storefront is supposedly still online. "Supposedly" is the keyword here, because some in the wide world of gaming have noticed that the Wii Shop channel (as well as the DSi Shop) have been down for days at this point. Given that Nintendo has said nothing publicly about this outage, it's not clear if this is some kind of error, or perhaps an attempt by the gaming giant to turn off the lights on two of its legacy platforms with as little fuss as possible.
Nintendo previously announced that the Wii U and 3DS eShops will close in March 2023. (If you want to know which games to pick up before those legacy storefronts close, check out our list.)
Mixed signals — Some unauthorized tools that Wii homebrewers use to interface with Nintendo's download server (such as NUSDownloader) still seem to be working, however, which seems to indicate that only the store's front-end interface itself is down, rather than the servers themselves. Those of us who only have unmodified Wiis currently have no way to get the many downloadable games we have purchased on that platform. Personally, I was planning on passing down the Virtual Console versions of Comix Zone and Toejam & Earl to my grandchildren, so this is a major bummer.
In early 2021, some Nintendo hackers noticed that 250 DSiWare games were removed from the North American 3DS eShop, which led some to believe that Nintendo was going to close some of its legacy online services that year. However, most of those games returned to the service after a few days. As such, it's possible that this is just some kind of bizarre error.
Making matters even more confusing, Nintendo's eShop was put in "maintenance mode" (whatever that means) in Russia because its payment service would no longer process transactions made using rubles amid the country’s invasion of Ukraine. In a rather unorthodox move, Nintendo still hasn't said anything publicly about this suspension, unlike some other gaming companies, such as Microsoft.
