Analysis: Up to 1,000 digital-only games will disappear when Nintendo closes its 3DS and Wii U stores

videogameschronicle.com:

Up to 1,000 digital-only games will no longer be available for purchase when Nintendo closes the Wii U and 3DS eShop stores next year, VGC analysis shows.

Although users will still be able to redownload their previous purchases for the foreseeable future, from March 2023 it will no longer be possible to buy games on the WiiU and 3DS online marketplaces, Nintendo announced this week.

But the deadline until the stores become inaccessible is effectively much sooner than that: From May 23, 2022 it will no longer be possible to use credit cards in the stores, and from August 29, 2022 it will no longer be possible to use eShop cards to add funds either.

After this point, some of Wii U’s and 3DS’s eShop library will still be available as physical releases, or via other systems. However, a significant number of eShop games were only released digitally, and a large portion of these will be platform exclusives. It’s these titles that will effectively disappear for good.

In total, around 2,000 games are currently available on the 3DS and Wii U eShop stores in the west, including:

The numbers above are estimates and rely on VGC creating our own lists to come up with these figures, and there will be some discrepancies based on region.

According to Nintendo’s own eShop data, there are 842 digital Wii U games currently available to download in North America, 838 in Europe and 684 in Japan.

These figures, of course, include download versions of retail games and Virtual Console titles. When these titles are removed from the data, you’re left with around 450 digital-only eShop games in Europe and North America which will no longer be available after the store closes.

This varies by region. In the UK for example, there are 405 download-only Wii U