Nintendo shutting down Wii online services in June
Nintendo has announced it will be shutting down support for several online services for the Wii on June 28. Although they won’t be stopping all online support, a lot of the free channels like the news channel and the Nintendo channel will be shut down come next June. Whether or not support for online play is also going to be shut down hasn’t been made clear yet, but with no announcement yet of a new Mario kart or smash bros. game it seems highly unlikely that support for those games is going to cease in June as well. The Wii shop channel will also remain online so you won’t have to worry about not being able to purchase or re-download any of the games in there.
Now console manufacturers ceasing support for a console is nothing new, what’s so weird about this case is how fast Nintendo is stopping support for the Wii. The PlayStation 2 for example was still being produced until earlier this year. Microsoft didn’t shut down the online servers for the original Xbox for many years after the release of the Xbox 360. Yet here we are, the Wii U having only been released a couple of months ago and already Nintendo seems to be putting the original Wii to rest, leaving millions of Wii owners out in the cold.
The explanation for all of this is probably the near disastrous drop in sales the Wii has known since its peak in 2007 and 2008. This also sheds a new light on the Wii mini Nintendo released a few months back, and that machines lack of online capabilities. The lack of developer support is probably the last big cause of this quick death of the Wii, with as good as no big games announced for the Wii apart from a Disney infinity port.
The big question now will be if the Wii U is going to be ready to fill the shoes of the Wii. The console has had a hard time the last few months with disappointing sales and a lack of titles to play on it. Add that to the threat of new consoles coming from Sony and Microsoft this fall, and things are looking very grim for Nintendo. We’ll have to wait and see what the future holds for the company in the hardware market.
Related Items
2 Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I’m quite under the impression that the success of the wii made them forget about customer service. 😐
Comon i loved the survey channel !!!! >_<