 Why is Nintendo shutting down the 3DS and Wii U eShops? The time is upon us. Over a year after Nintendo's announcement that it would close the online store for two of its previous devices, these eShops are now closing. You ask why, so we'll tell you. Because of money. Nice and simple. Except, there is more going on here. If we delve a little deeper into why these eShops are unprofitable, we can discover a peculiar, very Nintendo-specific business decision baked into its hardware that has led to this inevitability. This has all to do, sadly, with Nintendo not future-proofing their creations. Because, make no mistake, Nintendo does not expect any of its storefronts, not even the highly popular Switch, to last beyond a few years after obsolescence. See, I didn't say pandeblesians. The official Q&A on the Wii U and 3DS eShop closure states, This is part of the natural life cycle for any product line as it becomes less used by consumers over time. This natural life cycle, according to an anonymous former Nintendo employee, is designed specifically to avoid lawsuits. Speaking to Nintendo Life, they said, Nintendo knows it has to support a product for a minimum of 10 years or they risk some class action. Internally, Nintendo has been waiting for that day since 2014 based on sales. Nintendo looks at the first two years as the indicator of when to start packing it in with a console. According to this source, the sales of Wii U consoles was so low during these first two years that Nintendo set plans into place to only support the console for as little time as possible. They said, While the Nintendo Switch was being worked on, you saw a test with amiibo and a bunch of weird apps that interacted with those on Wii U. All just busy work to fill the sales void until the Switch would arrive. We started taking Wii U repair and replacement numbers about a year prior to the Switch launch. Nintendo of America was nearly out of optical drives for the repair replace program, and I mean like 2016 you could eyeball how many were left. Japan had a good supply, so they moved that inventory to America so we could handle repairs at least until the Switch launched. So the end of life program, at least for the console, began before NX launch. The plan then was always to ditch the Wii U as soon as possible after the Switch launched, with both hardware and software support provided only as long as necessary to avoid lawsuits. This same anonymous source suspects that it won't be long before the Wii U and 3DS servers are turned off entirely. Why though, does keeping a legacy storefront operational cost so much money? While these older eShops aren't a large part of Nintendo's business model, are they really costing more than they bring in? Potentially yes, due to the increasing costs to maintaining the storefront's security. According to IT expert and Twitter user GameOver30, while a decade doesn't feel like a long time, servers, operating systems, regulations, policies and laws are continually being updated. The constant march of technology and global regulations actually causes some IT infrastructures to get more expensive to maintain over time. I once worked for a company that spent multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to maintain a single legacy server for a business process. The business should have axed the server and processing many years ago, but they never did, and thus they kept paying for it. That was one server. Now look at hashtag Nintendo. The 3DS eShop, for example, likely has payment infrastructure, security, servers, operating systems, redundant channels etc, all of which are likely on systems from the time when the eShop was created, circa 2010. As these systems age, they require patches, security, special contracts, updates and personnel that know how they were built and maintained. As time goes on, there are security holes, servers, code, infrastructure etc that can't be brought up to modern standards. The problems with these legacy Nintendo servers are illustrated in an example from the December of 2022, when a major security vulnerability was discovered in 3DS, Wii U and Switch servers for Mario Kart and other games. According to Nintendo World Report, the ENL Buffer PWN exploit, rated as a 9.8 out of 10 critical on the common vulnerability scoring system, CVSS Scale, has been found in older Nintendo games dating back to Mario Kart 7 and can allow for a full takeover of the system by a third party. Potential users include accessing saved payment information and using the 3DS and Wii U gamepads built-in cameras and microphone to capture audio and video. Mario Kart 7 recently received its first patch in over a decade to patch the issue and the Switch titles have either been patched out of cycle or had the fix included in other features updates. However, the Wii U games have not been patched as of press time and it is not known if they will. The patch system of the 3DS, which requires downloading them from the eShop, also means that other vulnerable titles may not be fixed prior to the closure of the 3DS and Wii U eShops in March. Keeping these older servers online then eats into the cost of maintaining servers that are actually making Nintendo money. Once a new online storefront is established, Nintendo doesn't like to spend a lot of resources on older stores but these still need patches, updates and careful maintenance to avoid security leaks that could damage both Nintendo and its customers. Nintendo could have built the Switch eShop directly on top of the Wii U shop. This would have meant one store to update rather than multiple independent systems. This, for whatever reason, is not the approach Nintendo took and it comes with consequences. According to Shigeru Miyamoto, of course. Video games developed for dedicated consoles were created in different development environments for each console. As a result, when the hardware changed, the development environment could not necessarily be reused and so video games that have been released on older consoles could not be played on newer consoles without additional modification. There are benefits to drawing a line under the Wii U and starting afresh. The Switch is far more friendly for developers, especially those working in Unity and this might not have been the case if Nintendo had chosen to continue with their existing architecture. The downside is that preservation and archiving of older games is a lot more difficult as Nintendo's platforms evolve dramatically with each new iteration or, as Game Over 30 puts it, Nintendo chooses, right or wrong, to set up their eShops and systems per project meaning the 3DS and Wii U eShops are very likely their own entities each with their own cost structures and systems to maintain. The Wii U and 3DS eShops are casualties of Nintendo's unique business decisions just as the Switch eShop won't be maintained indefinitely once its successor is released. The moral of the story, nothing lasts forever.