Nintendo of America has just announced that as of May 20th, you will no longer have access to WiFi connection service on their Wii, DS and DSi games. That will include features like online play, online leaderboards and anything else that it does online. All games will work perfectly fine online.
Honestly this move makes me more weary of Nintendo and actually makes me reconsider the idea of buying a Wii U. I know most people will post and say that I’m overreacting, saying not many people play DS titles online, but it sucks knowing that if we make a party on our forums to play Phantasy Star Ø, as of May 20th, we won’t be able to play online just because Nintendo decided they didn’t want to support online services going on to the next generation.
To see all SEGA games that will be affected, hit the jump.
- BLEACH: Dark Souls
- Bleach: The Blade of Fate
- The Conduit 2
- Dinosaur King
- Ghost Squad
- Gunblade NY and LA Machineguns Arcade Hits Pack
- Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games
- Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (Wii/DS)
- Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (Wii/DS)
- Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer
- NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams
- Phantasy Star Ø
- Samba De Amigo
- Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing (Wii/DS)
- Sonic and the Black Knight
- Sonic Colors (Wii/DS)
- Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity
- Sonic Rush Adventure
- Virtua Tennis
All games being affected are posted here. How do you feel about this news?
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Nintendo is evil!!!
According to GAF, don’t blame Nintendo just yet, it may be worth it to blame the new owner of Gamespy (who provided Nintendo Wi-Fi functionality), for they also shut down a bunch of Gamespy-run PC game servers before this (and this makes it no surprise that Nintendo opted to switch to Amazon’s services for 3DS and Wii U):
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=102453476&postcount=255
Microsoft did the same thing with Xbox and SEGA did the same thing with Dreamcast. This is what happens when a console has been replaced or is otherwise no longer relevant to the company. Sucks though.
Xbox Live was shut down, which they needed for the service to move forward (so they say). Xbox Live was a pay to use feature, I’m fine with what they had to do, they did it in 2010, years and years into the 360 generation. Imagine the 360 going offline right now, that is basically the same thing as the Wii going offline.
The Dreamcast went offline due to SEGA going out of business and discontinuing their hardware business.
The issue is that these games where P2P, they weren’t affecting the Wii U at all. They don’t have a service like Xbox Live, they did it probably because they think people will upgrade to a Wii U to play their online Nintendo games.
A bit scummy.
Did you just completely ignore the GAF link about Gamespy’s Wii involvement I put up earlier?
No, I posted my source in the link. It was earlier in the morning. Shame, but isn’t it the same service (Gamespy) on the Wii U?
“No, I posted my source in the link. It was earlier in the morning. Shame, but isn’t it the same service (Gamespy) on the Wii U?”
Nah Wii U uses the Nintendo Network, which is now the official Nintendo online service; 3DS uses it too.
Several Dreamcast games can still be played online though on their original servers.
Several Dreamcast games were hosted on gamespy and they were the first to go offline. So I have to agree with Some Guy.
Really? Which?
I’ve never once played a Nintendo game online, though this still seems early for at least the Wii. I wonder how many active players they had online at peak hours. Aside from Mario Kart and maybe Smash Bros. I can’t imagine the other games saw many players.
I think the big difference between the original Xbox and the Wii is that the original Xbox had a huge online community, while I really doubt there’s a lot of people still playing the Wii online. The 360, also, has a huge online community.
So while it’s always unfortunate when servers are taken offline, I doubt a single person who’s read this news story still plays the Wii online; I don’t think much of anyone out there does. So I don’t think it’s a move that was made to sell Wii U’s, I think it was just made because nobody’s playing the Wii online, so Nintendo didn’t see it as being worth to keep the servers up and running.
The DS situation is a bit more surprising, and that I think Nintendo should have made an effort to keep going.
When I switched to 3DS I found out right away that the internet didn’t work for Phantasy Star 0. Now this explains it, they have different services.
That most likely isn’t the game for you, DS games still connect to the same servers. It’s just that regular DS games on the 3DS still require an open or WEP connection to play online. Regular DS games (and DS’s) aren’t compatible with WPA or WPA-2. Which is the default security on most networks nowadays. So even if your 3DS is connected to your internet that doesn’t mean regular DS titles will work right off the bat.
Eh, the DS had 3 years of online compatibility after the 3DS came out, and given that it was one of (the?) first portable consoles with online play and it generally wasn’t even implemented beyond a leaderboard or friend code nonsense, I won’t miss it much.
The Wii however is more inexcusable. The Wii U has only been out like a year and a half, it has backwards compatibility so Wii games are still relevant, and a new model of the Wii was released about half a year ago. Personally I will probably only miss Mario Kart Wii’s online, but I’m still outraged by the principle of the thing.