Nintendo Network

» see nintendo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Nintendo hardware was never in my house. i was a pc kid in Turkey, where consoles came in through importers at prices that made no sense against a machine you could upgrade one part at a time, and the hardware i cared about was the list i put in my forum signature. So this is written from outside the living room. What makes it worth writing has nothing to do with the games on it.

Nintendo Network went live on the 3DS on 26 January 2012, delivered in a system update, and shipped with the Wii U that November. What came before it was the friend code: a twelve digit number generated per console and in some cases per game, which both people had to type correctly before they could play together. Nintendo Network ID replaced that with a username and a password attached to a person, which every other platform had been doing since the late nineties.

The login carried almost everything those two machines did while connected. Purchases and redownloads through the eShop, Virtual Console, DLC, demos, online multiplayer, leaderboards, SpotPass and StreetPass relaying, and Miiverse, which was a social network Nintendo built itself and moderated by hand. One account, two consoles, and no way to move any of it to a third.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the account was actually for ~

Nintendo Network ID was tied to the console rather than to you. It lived on the machine, and if the machine died the purchases largely died with it, which is the part that aged worst. The company got closer to a real account with the Nintendo Account in 2016, and the Switch inherited that instead. Nintendo Network stayed behind on the two systems it was built for, gradually turning into a maintenance obligation for hardware nobody was making anymore.

It was also breached. In April 2020 Nintendo disclosed that roughly 160,000 Nintendo Network IDs had been accessed through credential stuffing, then revised the figure to around 300,000 accounts. The attack worked because NNID logins were still valid credentials for buying things on newer hardware, which is a strange afterlife for an account system attached to a discontinued console.

~ the day it died ~

The shop went first. Adding funds stopped on 29 August 2022 and the eShop stopped selling on 27 March 2023, which meant the catalogs of two consoles became unbuyable while the machines still worked. Miiverse had already been gone since 8 November 2017. On 4 October 2023 Nintendo announced that online play would end in early April 2024, and on 23 January it named the hour.

The end came at five in the afternoon Pacific time on 8 April 2024, midnight UTC on the ninth. Online co-op, matchmaking, internet rankings, data distribution and every mode that needed another player all stopped at once, across twelve years of software. Splatoon on the Wii U had no offline equivalent of the thing people bought it for. Everything that did not need the network kept working exactly as before, which is a way of saying the games are intact and the reason people played some of them is not.

~ what kept running ~

Pokemon Bank and Poke Transporter survived the shutdown and went free, so that creatures caught on the DS and 3DS could still be moved forward. Nintendo has scheduled that exception to end on 25 February 2027, which puts a date on the last piece of Nintendo Network still breathing.

The other survivor is not Nintendo's. Pretendo Network is a fan-built replacement that redirects a modified console to community servers and brings back online play and a version of Miiverse. It exists because the protocol was documented from the outside while the official one was still up. That is the usual shape of these endings: a company decides a service is finished, and the people who cared about it rebuild a worse copy that nobody can turn off.

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