Nintendo To Cancel Weather, News, and Other Built-In Wii Apps In June 175
damn_registrars writes "Nintendo has announced that at the end of June it will be canceling the services of several of the channels that are built in to the original Wii, including the Weather, News, Everybody Votes, and Mii Contest. This will also affect the WiiConnect24 services, though should not affect the Wii shopping channel. They added: 'Exchange of Wii messages on the Wii Message Board, exchange of Mii characters on the Mii Channel and message/data exchange within some games will be disabled.'"
Re:For that matter... (Score:3, Interesting)
They need some games. If Nintendo can come out with exclusives like Mario Kart and Zelda and Super Mario Galaxy for Wii U, then it will start to take off. Right now, the only great game is Mario. Everything else is just OK to poor.
They may succeed yet if Microsoft and Sony continue in their game console missteps, but I'm betting that Ouya takes off in a big way.
Re:did people really use them? (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a surprisingly good time spinning the globe and looking at weather around the world, and zooming in and out and learning a little geography along the way. I spent a good amount of time with it, to be honest. That was the great thing about it -- it was just a really nice 3D-ish/VR-ish globe that you could zoom in and out of, like Google Maps, and the weather was a hook or a bonus. That said, the Wii has spent the last few years in a kid's room so I haven't been on it much since the first few months after Christmas all those years ago.
The apps are already built and they just need a source of data -- I wish they'd partner with Yahoo or someone and keep them going. The older kid just moved out and the Wii just made its triumphant return to the living room. I'm genuinely sad about this news. I'm not, like, all broken up about it, but it's like when a show you like gets cancelled, or when the lead singer of a band dies.
Re:For that matter... (Score:1, Interesting)
My local Gamestop had a WiiU kiosk up recently. All that was playable on it was some version of Mario that looked exactly like the old 80's era Mario. I played it for a few minutes and was decidedly underwhelmed. I'm not sure if this was due to their ill-advised choice of software for their kiosk or just because the novelty of the second screen wore off a lot faster than the sense that the actual controller was very awkward in my hands. Maybe they have some great new games coming for it in the future. But I imagine that by the time they get here, I'll already own a PS4 or Xbox 720.
Re:did people really use them? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm genuinely sad about this news
My kids will be crushed, especially with the Mii contest going away. The spend as much time inventing and sharing Miis as they do playing the games.
Re: Is Nintendo starting to close up shop? (Score:3, Interesting)
Part of me wonders if this is because these are the exact features the Wii U doesn't support in its Wii mode, so it removes a reason someone might replace their broken Wii with a new Wii instead of a Wii U... but I also wonder how many zombie-Wiis are out there, downloading weather and new Miis every night, even though they haven't been turned on in years. It reminds me of the cost of running the HTML DTD servers [w3.org], constantly serving millions of completely unnecessary requests.