After fourteen years, the Call of Duty servers for the Nintendo Wii and 3DS are dead. Yesterday, CharlieIntel reported that the servers for the platforms had gone offline, and any attempts to get online were met with an error message confirming the serves were no longer in operation. An update from CharlieIntel shared on social media confirmed that Nintendo WiFi servers were “discontinued,” meaning older titles would become “unplayable.”
“The Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service, which provides certain online functionality for many Wii, Nintendo DS, and Nintendo DSi software titles, was discontinued,” the message from CharlieIntel reads on. According to the statement provided, it looks as if the choice to abandon the servers came from Nintendo themselves and not Activision.
UPDATE: Activision tells me that the Nintendo WiFi servers were discontinued and that resulted in older games being unplayable. “The Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service, which provides certain online functionality for many Wii, Nintendo DS, and Nintendo DSi software titles, was…
— CharlieIntel (@charlieINTEL) August 3, 2023
Most surprisingly, there was no forward warning that the servers would be taken offline, so it could take some players by surprise should they still be playing on the platform. Since the consoles are not often considered the go-to choice for Call of Duty titles, we could imagine the number of players still active are fairly low.
Last month, the Xbox 360 servers connected to Call of Duty went online again. The reasoning why isn’t clear, but the numbers of players jumping on the servers speak for themselves, reconfirming the popularity of some of the earlier titles. The original Black Ops pulled in more than 120,000 players (123,852 to be accurate). Black Ops II drew in a smaller but no less impressive 11,514 players, and Modern Warfare 3 players flocked in their thousands, amassing 79,619, thanks to data collated by Twitter user Idle Sloth.
In other Nintendo news, the developer achieved record profits following the release of The Super Mario Bros Movie and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
