Gamer Claims Wii U Consoles Can Be Bricked By Not Playing Them Enough

gamerant.com:

A tech-savvy tinkerer has taken online to share an account of a bizarre Wii U bug that can leave the console bricked and hence entirely useless if it isn't played enough. The emergence of this report coincided with Nintendo's decision to take some popular Wii U games' servers offline due to a major security issue.

With approximately 13.5 million in lifetime sales, the Wii U is one of Nintendo's least successful consoles of all time. There's no one single reason why it failed to capture a significant audience, although some of the most common consumer complaints about the system centered on its lackluster third-party library, gimmicky controller setup, and absence of an internal hard drive. Combined with the success of the Switch, this resulted in a speedy demise for the system, which Nintendo intends to finalize by shutting down the Wii U eShop later this month.

Nintendo Gamers Have About a Year to Transfer Unused 3DS and Wii U Funds

More evidence suggesting that the Wii U simply cannot catch a break has now arrived in the form of a user report claiming the console can essentially brick itself if left unused long enough. Booting it after a prolonged period can supposedly lead to an unrecoverable system failure indicated by a 160-0103 Gamepad error. The code itself denotes a critical NAND memory corruption issue that renders the console unusable, but attempting a factory reset of an affected Wii U will also permanently brick it, as per the same source.

While the reporting user discovered that it's possible to recover from this state with a NAND backup created on a hacked console, they claimed the affected hardware they inspected was not modified in any way, implying all Wii U systems are potentially exposed to this issue.