So I’ve been hearing a lot of rumors that the 3DS was going to shut down soon.

It’s already been shut down in dozens of countries and I’m worried that it might be closing down everywhere else soon.

Firs of all, the 3DS went down mysteriously on Thursday for hours with no explanation and then on Friday and today I was at Gamestop trying to buy 3DS digital games and ran into a number of problems.

I was trying to buy the digital version of Pokemon Red and one Gamestop location said that they no longer sell digital codes for the 3DS eshop because they stopped receiving them at some point last year.

Today I went to another Gamestop and the same thing was said, they haven't received any new ones, but there were some left over and I managed to get one. But in this case, the District Manager was actually surprised that it worked because he said he already thought that the 3DS eshop shut down last month, which is kind of a suspicious thing to say, especially from someone who's in charge of multiple locations.

What are your thoughts?

I do think if the Eshop does get shut down it is going to lead the route of finding alternative ways to play such as emulators. But really if people look well enough they can find ways to "hack" their 3ds to be able to play the games straight through the system. It is really easy now compared to what it was only like a year or two ago. The only hard part I see now is finding the ROM files for 3ds those can be slightly harder to get "legit" nonharmful files.

So really I don't mind Eshop going down since all my systems I have done what I mentioned above so if there ever comes a point where if there is a digital-only game that I wanted to play on 3ds I could find it and install it.


All of this is why I don't like games going towards the digital-only way. Eventually, all online services will go down blocking access. With a physical copy, I don't have to worry about anywhere near as much.

(if anyone is too lazy to search how to do it PM and I can give a direct link to it since it does not include anything illegal)

pokemon x : Once it does eventually go down, I guess it would be a no brainer for everyone who did buy digital games to just download them all so that they can at least keep them on the device forever, granted they have a decent enough card.

So I'm guessing the 1st stage of shutting it all down begins today. DSiWare games started being removed from the 3DS eshop in America just a couple hours ago.

That's more than like 300 games gone.

zanderlex : It's funny you say this actually. I literally just tried to get on to the store maybe 25 minutes ago before I saw this post. I couldn't get on. Now I also live in Canada so it could have been removed here before, but I'm not entirely sure. I can't imagine the 3DS store will exist for much longer though. Nintendo doesn't really support the console anymore.

MoblinGardens : The 3DS shop itself should be fine for a little while.

On Christmas,the eshop was down the entire day but that was probably because of shopping.

On Thursday, the 3DS eshop was down the entire night with no explanation.

Then over the weekend all DSi games were removed from the eshop.

Did you get some weird error code?

The DSIware being pulled seems to indicate that this may be where it's headed. I find that this is a horrible move. They had a massive install base, and the 3DS hasn't even been out for a decade. I'm just glad that I have a hacked 3DS so no game can elude me once all those digital only games are no longer able to be acquired through official means.

pennylessz : Some of the DSiWare games that have been pulled were put back into the store. There was no explanation as to why they were pulled and not all of the games were put back in, so that's weird.