Over nine months on from the shutdown of the 3DS and Wii U online servers, Nintendo has issued a statement asking players to "refrain" from using unofficial services that allow them to continue playing like nothing ever happened, thank you very much.
While some players valiantly hung onto the old servers for as long as possible to keep them alive last year – an effort which lasted a whopping 210 days for one particular Mario Kart 7 player – if you boot up your Wii U or 3DS now and try to jump into an online game, you're not going to have any luck. That is if you don't turn to other, not Nintendo-approved means, anyway. After Nintendo first announced its plans to shut the Wii U and 3DS servers down, the developers working on the unofficial Pretendo servers confirmed that they had "begun discussing our development road map internally to accommodate this," and today, it serves as a popular replacement for the online services for many.
In a new post on its Japanese customer support Twitter account (translated by Google and verified using DeepL), Nintendo doesn't call out Pretendo or any other specific alternatives by name, but it warns against using "unauthorized services" that replace the Wii U's online functionality as "they may pose unexpected security risks." It's not clear what prompted the company to post this now – as it points out itself, the servers officially shut down on April 9 last year, and while Pretendo is still a work in progress, it's been available for quite some time now.
[お願い]2024年4月9日にサービスを終了しましたWii Uのオンラインプレイ等の機能につきまして、機能を代替する非正規サービスの存在を確認しております。そうしたサービスを使用されますと、思わぬセキュリティリスクをもたらす恐れがございますので、ご使用にならないようお願いいたします。January 15, 2025
The statement also comes at a time when Nintendo fans everywhere have got their eyes glued on the company's social media pages in the hopes of seeing a Switch 2 announcement. Apparently, that could be happening sooner rather than later, as one leaker recently claimed it'll happen this week – something which was corroborated by multiple other sources including Eurogamer and The Verge's Tom Warren. We're now halfway through the week, so we'll just have to watch this space to see if the reports end up being correct.
Since Nintendo's warning about using "unauthorized services," to replace the dead Wii U servers, Pretendo has publicly stated that "we are committed to user safety, going so far as to release security patches for games Nintendo themselves no longer supports."
