Nintendo has yet to explain why the online shop interfaces for its two most successful platforms have become unavailable.

The Nintendo Wii Shop Channel and the Nintendo DSi Shop Channel are the two platforms through which you can access the games you have bought in the past. However, if you try to do this on the Wii Shop now, you’ll first see a blank page. A few minutes later, you’ll get an error message 209601: unable to connect to the server, try again later, visit Nintendo’s customer support website.

Even if we do this, we still don’t get much information. On its site, the big N says that error message 209601 usually means that we cannot establish a good connection via Wi-Fi because of interference. It may not be correct because if there was no problem before, why should there be now? By the way, the Nintendo Wii Shop Channel stopped allowing us to shop there in 2019, but we could still access the content we’d already bought.

Nintendo has previously announced that such access will also end at an unspecified date, but the company has not provided any specifics on this. Users receive another error message on the Nintendo DSi Shop: the error code 290502 pops up. According to the big N, it is again an error message referring to wireless interference, which again does not seem logical. Given that similar error messages pop up on both platforms (the code is different, but its meaning is the same), it might just be a minor bug on Nintendo’s part. Still, given that the Japanese company hasn’t commented on the matter, it seems a bit worrying.

We’ve previously written that the eShop will be shut down on Nintendo Wii U and Nintendo 3DS in March 2023, so you won’t be able to buy games on those two platforms either (but downloads, updates and online gameplay will remain). Could Nintendo be shooting down the Wii/DSi duo on purpose?

Source: VGC