After months of service outages, Nintendo’s Wii Shop Channel and DSi Shop are back online.
Nintendo’s two virtual marketplace services went down in March of this year. In a statement to Kotaku on the outage, Nintendo acknowledged the downtime but had nothing to report other than that the shops were undergoing maintenance and that it would provide updates on them at a later date. It seems it completely skipped the update and simply put both back online instead.
While the virtual shops are back online, that doesn’t mean you can load up on points and go shopping for virtual console and Wii Ware games like it’s 2006. The Wii Shop Channel was shut down in 2019 and the DSi shop closed in 2017. The closures effectively limited their usage to window shopping, redownloading previously purchased games, and listening to the classic Wii Shop music. Nintendo recently reported that the Wii U and 3DS eShops are following these discontinuations very soon.
“As of late March 2023, it will no longer be possible to make purchases in Nintendo eShop for the Wii U system and the Nintendo 3DS family of systems,” Nintendo announced. “It will also no longer be possible to download free content, including game demos. Furthermore, as this date draws closer, related services will cease to function.”
If you just want an excuse to hear that catchy shop music again, there is a Chrome extension that adds songs from the Wii Shop Channel, 3DS eShop, and DSi shop to marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, and more.
