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 lasted a whopping 210 days for one particular Mario Kart 7 player developers working on the unofficial Pretendo servers confirmed
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.
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.
Former Switch marketing lead says “as wild as these leaks are Nintendo is going to stick to their plan,” not budging on Switch 2 date “no matter what.”
