Sad times for masters of the stylus, as Miiverse is put on notice.
Update: Nintendo has confirmed via a series of Miiverse updates that the service will be closing in all territories. Users can download existing posts using the ‘Post History Download’ feature as outlined.
Original Story: Nintendo has confirmed that Miiverse, the Wii U and 3DS social network, will officially shut down in Japan at 3PM on November 8, 2017.
Once the service has ended users will be greeted by an error code – 115-5004 on Wii U, and 015-5004 on 3DS – and the posting and viewing of messages will be unavailable.
For titles that use Miiverse posts in-game, all references will vanish, as seen in this screenshot for New Super Mario Bros U. Sob.
In the statement, Nintendo also confirms that a service will be made available to allow users to download their own posts for posterity using the web version of Miiverse. Further details will be announced at a later date.
Despite Nintendo’s chequered history with online games and services, Miiverse was a genuinely forward-thinking, creative, and friendly social space. We’ll miss it, but as we’ve seen in Splatoon 2, it’s quite possible that some elements will be reused on a game-by-game basis.
At the time of writing there is no news on the fate of the network in Europe or North America, but we should probably all prepare for the worst.
Thanks, Kotaku.
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