Wii Shop Channel is Closing its Doors
The Wii Shop Channel will not allow you to purchase anything January 30, 2019 and Wii Points cannot be added after March 26, 2018. The whole Channel will shut down later in 2019. That’s at least more than a year before it shuts down, but do not worry. We at RiiConnect24 are prepared.
Nintendo has said this on their UK website:
“In 2019, we will close the Wii Shop Channel used on Wii and Wii U (the Wii Shop Channel is accessible on the Wii U via the Wii backwards compatibility feature), which has been available since [November] 2006. We would like to thank our loyal customers for supporting the Wii Shop Channel, and would like them to continue to enjoy software downloaded from the shop.”
Don’t be sad because…
- We have pretty much all of the Channels, WiiWare, VC and DLC from the Wii Shop Channel preserved (except Korean region Virtual Console games) They will not be gone forever.
- We have found a way to download the HTML pages the Wii Shop Channel uses, so we could do something with them at some point. Some of them are backed up already, we were doing this in case they shut it down at some point (which they’re gonna do now)
- Each WiiWare game loads a manual from the Wii Shop Channel. We will also download these as well and possibly host them somewhere.
- The main song that it uses is well-known by now and you can find it (and tons of remixes of it) on YouTube. There even was an awesome remix of it for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U.
We don’t know if we will eventually make a replacement to the Wii Shop Channel, but remember we have most of the stuff preserved for future generations and we have plenty of time. Don’t be sad, the Wii will live on!
By the way, if you wanna read the interviews for the Wii Shop Channel:
Nintendo’s statement on their UK website can be found here:
