Rumour: Nintendo Of America Might Be Shutting Down Its Support Forums

Nintendo shutting down everything.

Shut down on March 31st?

I didn't even know they had support forums.

Honestly the best place for online support is not their forums, but the r/NintendoSwitch where they have a daily support thread. Most posts receive an actionable solution to their problems within a couple hours.

What’s next the Wii Shop Channel?
Wait a second...

I’m actually surprised the Wii U eshop is still active, I suspect that’s not far behind.

@E_Gadds_Garage
That's because it's online services shares servers with the 3DS. Since the 3DS still has a moderately good sales pace even today, it will stay up until the 3ds goes lower in sales

@E_Gadds_Garage Nah, the Wii U eShop will be around for quite a while. Nintendo farmed out all online services for the Wii to a third-party company and shut them down to cut off their contract. Everything from 3DS and Wii U onward is running on Nintendo-owned servers. There’s no real reason to cut off the Wii U eShop from Nintendo’s standpoint.

I remember using their support forums once, during the Wii and DS days. I think it was a GBA hardware related question I had.

@thesilverbrick I'd like to add that Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection was powered by GameSpy, the same company that ran servers for plenty of early to mid-2000's PC games.

@Wilforce that's not great for people who can't access Reddit.
I'm banned from the site (after a particularly heated debate) so couldn't post there even if I wanted to.

I visited recently and the options for chat/text message were pretty limited...

Now I had memories of the old NSider Forums. Fun times.

As far as I saw, it was an unhelpful, apathetic forum. I posted two tech/account questions there and they never got answered. That forum won't be missed.

@Wilforce The support thread is pretty good, but other than that it is pretty useless.

Probably got too toxic and they didn't want to deal with it anymore. That's how 90% of the internet is these days.

That's sad. I haven't been on there in quite a long time, but I joined the tech support forums when I was 13. I really wanted to help, so I'd constantly refresh the page to try to get a question I could answer. Most of the time I just told people to contact Nintendo (lol), but there were a few times that I was actually able to help. At one point, on the old site, I made it to the first page of the top contributors list and I was so happy about it.

Edit: wait what am l talking about, l remember the forums and l looked around for answers on there before. Well l guess l have to call them now for help? I liked this way though...l hate calling and talking to people for support...Its like calling the bank

What's going on?!

@Joeynator3000 it does feel like that way...one of the reasons l won't be excited for everything because it will be shut down or be limited time thing

Cool. Pull those resources to make online better please.

Probably got too many posts about Joycon drift.

What's next? Nintendo announces it's going out of business? 😳

Haven't used them in years. Not a big deal.

It was never that helpful past early 2010s, you get better results on Youtube, Reddit and local community through social media.

Do people even use forums like these on sites any more? If i need advice i just find a Reddit thread what will have it answered or just ask myself on the subreddit related to the advice i need.

@Mr-Fuggles777 why wouldn’t you use an alt account the reddit police aren’t gonna arrest you

Everytime I go there the forum is filled with replies of people clowning on Nintendo for the Switch working about as good as some really cheap knockoff. Pretty funny, but it doesn't exactly solve the fact that my dock decided to just give up. (I don't like having to throw away so much and create unnecessary waste, since most stuff lasts years... Otherwise known as longer than any switch accessory even dreams about)

@Aguy711 I've tried and they keep getting blocked with a notice saying "this account has been permanently suspended from reddit". I even created a new email address and that account was banned within 24 hours.
Its not the end of the world as it was a massive timesink anyway.

@Mr-Fuggles777 did you delete and redownload the app?

@Aguy711 yes and tried using a VPN

@TheFarmboy Oh man, I remember the NSider forums! An oddly more innocent time of the internet... in some regards.

@Mr-Fuggles777 What in the world did you say on there? It’s not often people get permabanned in that fashion.

@WallyWest They were somewhat active, but mostly just people doing guess work... Not enough people knowing answers browsing the questions half the time. I've been giving free support in the Switch Reddit for the past few years and found the support there much more reliable. Granted, as another user pointed out, the rest of the reddit is a bit of a dumpster fire consisting of what's the next port you want, "X semi-popular game from 2018" is a hidden gem (bonus points if it's the same game someone proclaimed was amazing just yesterday, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a popular one for that at the moment), and posts that really belong in the daily question thread or not posted at all (such as the recommend me a game that I'd like). I do follow a few people on there whom I've seen are reputable leakers in the games industry, but aside from those specific users I don't really follow the daily threads much anymore.

@nessisonett it all started with me posting in a vegan sub pics of me washing my cat with vegan friendly shampoo, and then saying they couldn't use these brands now as its been tested on animals - and the shenanigans kind of escalated from there

Didn't know one existed to be honest

@Mr-Fuggles777
After reading through this thread, I'm relieved to hear that that's all it was. I mean, I don't know where you went from there, but that was a genuinely funny thing to do. Regardless of what they probably called you or said about you, that's not anything like the vitriol and toxicity that comes out of vegan subs. Harmless and humorous, in my opinion. I can only imagine what they'd say about me for saying that about you...

Admittedly I still miss the European Nintendo forums a little which shut down years ago. There were some really nice people there. But eh, what can you do!

Good thing we still have the forum here on NintendoLife!

can anybody explain what's going on with Nintendo and it's servers.
this company bulks with money why are they shutting down everything?

can we expect a total new online experience very soon or a collaboration with microsoft, or are they just irritating consumers.

@rushiosan
i realy like reddit, the best place to be to get help.
official suport forums never worked for me from any brand like LG for instance what rubbish brand is that for its comsumers, don't answer any question or listen to its community.

it's emberassing to see that actualy only the consumers help you out of good will.
for me it's a reason to ditch a brand in the future.
nintendo must be warned about this cause it seems a asian way of working to ignore consumers. i hope nintendo does not get arrogancy because they doing great.

@PALversusNTSC NINTENDO ARE CHEAP SKATES - Nintendo are the ultimate company for cutting corners and cheaping out, a company of half measures.

Downgrading the SNES CPU and crippling it.
N64 - Removing RGB, gimping the RAM, cutting the Sound chip (forcing a minimum of 10% cpu resources to sound, refusing to go with cd (wouldn't pay for licensing) Holding back vital development tools to look better than 3rd parties.
GCN - wouldn't pay license for DVD, went mini as slightly cheaper, took ages to sort out a deal with Dolby. Purposely withheld 16:9 to make Wii look like an upgrade.
Wii - Component lead and RGB scart, 11th hour addition due to major fan backlash as Wii was going to be composite only, vastly gimped output compared to GCN. No digital out.
Wii U - cheaped out on RAM, went tri core instead of Quad, measely 40GB of onboard memory which was purposely speed limited to usb 2.0 to match HDD which is what most owners would have to use, no Dolby license lol, purposely held back visuals to 720p, spent a year butchering the sheika slate from Wii U version of Zelda instead of optimisation to make Switch look impressive, digital triggers.
Switch - cheap drifting sticks, cheap breakable buttons, triggers designed to break, digital triggers, fisher price build, less accurate motion controllers than Wii, gimped SD not HD sound.

Forums were never helpful to me. People either strayed off-topic way too much or there were no responses.

@liveswired
There's a pretty obvious reason behind that. Not only does Nintendo aim to be the cheaper, more accessible option for everyone (even though the Switch is pretty freaking expensive if you add up the costs), but they also don't have as much money as Sony and Microsoft.

Cashing in on higher-quality and more powerful hardware is a big risk they'll be taking and it has clearly failed them every time they tried to do it.

Besides, they don't necessarily need certain features on their controllers. What was the point of analog triggers if barely any Nintendo games actually used them. Better yet, what's the point of them outside of driving games?

And looking at Breath of the Wild, think about it. I don't believe the game would be as fun if it were THAT level of gimmicky. There's nothing wrong with a game that's been optimized for a regular controller. Yeah, it's a missed opportunity, but it wasn't that big of one. The game right now is still very fun.

Sad because they've always been so helpful 🙄

@PBandSmelly and I wonder if everyone else is like me and only bought one to hack it lol. No need for a store anyway 👍

Soooooooo anti-consumer. It's evil and greedy.

@NIN10DOXD That's very possible too. As much as it annoys me like the rest I have to admit their setup to fix drifting joy cons is pretty smooth. The whole process of making a claim, sending it out and getting it back fixed takes about a week (at least it did for me both times). Simple and it was free.

@Liam_Doolan @antdickens Don't you think the headline should be prefaced by "Rumour" and tagged as such? The entire article from Nintendo Everything is based upon a single unsubstantiated reddit post that is now deleted by the author and has the supposed email as the sole comment on the post. Not a single person in authority has verified that this is true; please do not pretend as though it is such until you hear it straight from Nintendo.

@PBandSmelly

The 3DS is no longer in production.

@Mr-Fuggles777 I’m not gonna lie, that’s a relief to hear. The vegan community can be a bit scary so at least you didn’t say anything worse!

Forums take money and staffing to maintain this. Why would anyone think this is comes free? And as with anything no two problems are the same. So if you can't contact and detail your problems then you got other things that needs resolving before you should be asking NIN contactus option.

It is a repository showing all the problems they have with the joycons and all the other issues that switch has, somebody sees it as a liability and Nintendo I am sure.

I'm just curious what first party games will they be giving out for free if the forums does shut down

Yeah right. Thier not gonna do that. It'd be a very very stupid thing to do. Why would anybody start a stupid rumor like this?

@Mr-Fuggles777 Reddit is a horrible place, but you can just change your IP address and use a different email.

@Trajan much happier since I've been away from it, it's just a really toxic echo chamber where people flock to hear there own views repeated rather than to debate and look at issues from other points of view.

@PALversusNTSC Sadly, their policy has always been "try to push as many automated responses as possible so the user may get tired of asking". Taking a product to the repair (or replacement) line is always Nintendo's last stand.

@ModdedInkling Nintendo only aim to make the cheapest consoles with maximum profit.

Though to be fair I'm surprised Switch even has a 720p screen. Take apart a joycon and it is fisher price quality, cheap, cheap, cheap. Shocking.

@NPC411 its all true.

@liveswired
But if you know that already, why complain about it? This is their only viable option.

RIP the forums.