 Hey everyone, welcome back to Nintendo Prime, no facecam today, it's the weekend, I kind of take it easy on the weekends when it comes to YouTube, but you know, we have a giveaway going on, you know, I'm not going to speak much more than that, head to the Gleam.io link down in the pinned comment or the description if you want to know what's going on with that giveaway. Oh, and by the way, we're on that road to 80,000 subscribers, seriously, be one of the people that were here before it happened, and hit that subscribe button. Okay, so one of my fears with Nintendo, and this is just a fear I think I have with all of these console manufacturers, but the biggest fear from Nintendo and many other companies is what happens as older hardware ages. Now look, we've been playing video games forever, I could still buy a used or refurbished or third party Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, 2600, Sega Genesis, PlayStation 1, etc. Buy the original games in the physical farms, put them in those consoles, and play them, right? That's still something you can do, assuming that the physical copies of the games are also in good enough condition to actually play, which that actually matters significantly more when we're talking about those disc based consoles versus the cartridges. Cartridges tend to be a lot more durable. More often than not, the only thing that might need to be replaced is the internal battery, and sometimes replacing that internal battery is not perfect. If you do it, it could actually end up wiping the game files. There's been some interesting finds in trying to refurbish some of those older games, and that's a lot. You know, most of these games that we're talking about have already been dumped and there's already ROM files and all that, so we can recreate them and put them on a cartridge if we need to. Of the last, I don't know, I would say maybe since the start of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 1 era, I've been really worried about this future where we buy most of our games digitally and obviously eventually get to rental services not like Game Pass, but this really is about digital distribution altogether. And digital distribution existed before the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, but the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One actually required you, just like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series today, to install your games, essentially just like a PC has always required you to install your games. You don't play them directly off the disk. So this has obviously encouraged people to end up going digital anyways as the, basically the physical disk doesn't hold much value. That physical disk is nothing but an unlock key, usually it doesn't even contain most of the game files. You have to download them anyways. But you can still resell that access key so that does have some inherent value. Now on PC, this has been a problem here and there. There are a select few older games that are a bit more difficult to enjoy today on Modern Harbor, although most of these have been modified in some way to at least run through MS-DOS or something. But the bottom line is that digital games are scary and they're scary for one reason only. What happens when these games that you legally purchased vanish? What happens when the servers that hosted those games no longer host them and thus you get a new computer, your old computer die, your hard drive died, whatever it might be and you put a new hard drive in or you get a new computer and you go to re-download your game but you can't. You log on the Steam and hey that game is no longer accessible to re-download. Okay. So what happens when the Nintendo Wii? Those first real system that had the ability to download games through the Wii Shop, be it virtual console games or some of the indie games. They didn't really let you purchase a lot of the big games in this fashion that didn't really start to Wii U but people owned a number of virtual console games and a number of games kind of like World of Goo. You know these indie style games that Nintendo really started allowing with the Wii Shop channel. What happens when you go to the Wii Shop channel and you can no longer download your games? Well I guess we're finding out right now. So this is an article over on Nintendo Life and it comes from a number of places but easily verified I already checked to see because we actually have a Nintendo Wii in my house believe it or not and that Wii, well, you can't access the Wii Shop channel right now. So here's what it says on Nintendo Life, it says if you've tried to access the Wii Shop channel over the past few days you might not have had much luck. According to Nintendo Everything, the digital store has been experiencing major issues. It's supposedly impossible to access the store front at all and you'll instead be presented with a blank screen on startup which eventually follows with an error code. Nintendo's online maintenance page does not mention any issues either and that comes from going to Nintendo. Although Nintendo stopped game sales on this digital store in 2019, the current error means anyone who wants to access previous downloads and purchases is unable to right now. Nintendo previously said it would stop downloads at the Wii at some point but never specified the exactly when users will no longer be able to re-download games. More recently, Nintendo announced it would be closing down the 3DS eShop and Wii U eShop by March of 2023 while users will no longer be able to buy games and still be able to download previous purchases. So here's the thing, this was going to happen someday, Nintendo was going to shut down the Wii Shop. After all, that system is going to be 20 years old here. In 2026, it will be 20 years that the Nintendo Wii will have aged, almost old enough to legally drink in the United States. And what's interesting about this prospect is, this is exactly what we've been worried about isn't it? A company removing the ability to re-download games that we legally own. This is the danger of Game Pass. This is the danger of an all digital future. This is the danger of digital purchases. This danger isn't as prevalent on PC, yes. Some games you buy today on PC might be difficult to play in 30 years, but we're not 30 years removed from the Wii. Games I bought on my PC 20 years ago I could still play to this day. So this is an interesting issue that is going to keep happening because this is eventually going to happen to the 3DS and Wii U as well. This is going to happen to the PlayStation 3. In fact, Sony already attempted to do it to the PlayStation 3 and there was massive fan backlash, so they kind of backtracked on that so you can still download your PlayStation 3 games. They're eventually going to try this with the PlayStation 4, too. It's just going to happen. The Xbox 360 and the Xbox One, Microsoft's eventually going to shut down those servers as well. So, eventually all these companies are highly likely going to shut down these services. And this is, again, what's scary? Imagine that you spent thousands and thousands of dollars for the convenience of digital to not have to go to the store, to not have to brave the elements at times, to not fight over people or wait in lines, maybe for just the convenience of quickly swapping between games where you don't have to remove the disc or cartridge to do that. You just wanted that digital convenience. Maybe you took advantage of digital stores, the sales that might happen on them that are different than the physical sales. And in the end, after a decade, a little over a decade, well, 15 years, you lose access to the games you bought. Now, look, for me personally, just on a personal level, this isn't as big of a deal since I don't play a lot of my older games. But imagining losing access to the games I did buy is interesting. I have a copy of Sin and Punishment Star Successor here for Wii, brand new sealed in box. Thank you to the fan who sent that to me. This is actually an amazing game. I played it back in the day. But imagine that I only own that copy digitally. And now I wanted to buy a Wii, just like we bought a new Wii not too long ago. And I couldn't download the game I bought. That would suck. That would suck knowing that I bought something like this and couldn't download it. Now, this isn't the case because this game wasn't available on the Wii shop. But that's the danger of what happens after. Wii is a very targeted, very specific thing that you're not going to be able to do. This is basically virtual console. The thing mostly impacted. Yes, again, we talked about one other game, a few other games that exist on the Wii shop. But this is mostly virtual console games that are impacted because this was the first iteration of virtual console. And yeah, you're just not going to be able to access them. And what sucks about this obviously is no announcement from Nintendo. Because why would Nintendo announce it? There is so much that there's never going to be a positive reaction to saying, hey, we're shutting down the Wii shop channel. We're just shutting it down. You're not going to be able to access it anymore. Remember, there is nothing on Nintendo's maintenance page talking about the Wii shop channel being under maintenance or being down. That means that this outage is either 1000% accidental, which if it was, Nintendo would have commented on it by now because it's been down from my estimation almost four full days now that it's been down. And that was just some sort of, you know, they got hacked or had some server problems. Nintendo would have already announced it. The reason, the obvious reason why Nintendo hasn't is they know it's going to be a negative reaction. Nintendo took it down on purpose because it's highly likely Nintendo is just fulfilling their prior promise of saying, hey, we are going to remove access to the Wii shop channel eventually. They didn't say when eventually was three years ago and that eventually has seemingly arrived. And this just sucks. Not just because it comes out of nowhere without any warning. But also because of the implications for the future. See, for me, I didn't actually buy a lot of virtual console games back on the Wii, so this doesn't impact me much. But this is the reminder that, hey, look, they cut off purchases back in 2019. Well, they're cutting off purchases in early 2023 for the Wii U and 3DS. So you look at that and you can now basically project out that Nintendo's probably going to cut off access to downloading games on those platforms in 2026, at least based on what they did with Wii. And that's just that's very scary to think about. Also, since Nintendo is likely going to do it without warning because they don't want to deal with the backlash. So granted, this video might get some backlash and some other people that cover this might get some backlash as well, but not nearly as much as Nintendo having an official post about it on Twitter, an official video about it on YouTube or anything official said about it. Because as long as they don't say anything officially, as long as there's no recognition that they took down this shop public, they can sort of live in this plausible deniability world where, hey, look, as long as you don't ask us about it, we don't have to act like we did anything wrong in the first place. It's one of those, oh, and if we do get asked about it, we can act like it was an accident. Like Nintendo is obviously keeping themselves in a very advantageous position where look at the backlash gets too big, we put it back up. If not, you know, we pretend it was a mistake and they go, you know, whatever, we just move on with our name. Like Nintendo is in a very solid position to get away with this. And this is the reality that we all knew was going to happen someday. And now it's just, it's being realized. And as it's realized, it doesn't make it any more palpable. It doesn't make it any more easier. It doesn't make it easier to digest. I'm having a hard time digesting it, which is why we're talking about it. I'm not sure that there's really an easy solution to this moving forward. Support for these platforms isn't going to exist forever. I mean, our phones is an example. Eventually, you know, like an iPhone 6 today cannot get the same updates as my iPhone 13. Why? Because they stop support for the older hardware, which means there are literally applications on my phone that wouldn't run on that hardware anymore. And that that's just that that happens. It's expected. I'm not sure what to think other than this is just the realization of what we've all feared. And that realization is here. And if you were afraid of it, you had every right to be. And you still have every right to be afraid of it. If you own a 3DS or Wii U, a PlayStation 3, a PlayStation 4, an Xbox One, an Xbox 360, you have the right to be afraid. You're going to lose access to your games because it's already happening with Nintendo and we already know Sony tried it too. So this is just is what it is. And you guys let me know your thoughts in this down below because, you know, again, for me personally, the Wii Shop Shutdown doesn't affect me. But I know there's a lot of you out there that bought hundreds of dollars, hundreds of dollars worth of virtual console games that are going to be pretty upset that if there we ever dies and they go to buy a new one or a new used one or whatever, that they're not going to be able to redownload their games because there's no way to back them up legally anyways. Obviously you can hack your Wii, but I don't know. You guys let me know you think about this down in the comments below. This obviously goes into a much grander conversation about pushing piracy and supporting piracy because you never lose access to pirated games, right? But anyways, I'm Nathan Rovell Jantz from Nintendo Prime. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next video.