Nintendo Is Ending Its Strange yet Charming Miiverse Service

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Nintendo Is Ending Its Strange yet Charming Miiverse Service

Nintendo is putting its social media service to sleep. Well, more like smothering it with a pillow. Nintendo’s Miiverse, first launched on the Wii U and later the Nintendo 3DS, allowed players to post screenshots, artwork and comments about the games they played. With the videogame company moving on to their Miiverse-less Switch, Nintendo officially announced that Miiverse will come to an end on Nov. 7.

Since the Wii U launched in 2012, Miiverse has been a source for the weird and the wonderful. The service created “communities” for different games; within the communities, players could share their progress, ask for advice, give game tips and draw pictures of their favorite characters. Miiverse also interacted with specific games, with posts and drawings showing up within various Wii U titles.

At its weirdest, Miiverse resulted in memes (one young Super Metroid player asking “y cant metroid crawl?” for example), or bizarrely tragic or nihilistic posts; it’s hard to enjoy Super Mario 3D World when you see a child lamenting in the overworld about how his parents are fighting. At its most wonderful, however, Miiverse was a gallery for artists young and old to show off their skills; this was a unique and safe space where fandoms could thrive creatively. Take a quick walk through the Inkopolis Square hub in Splatoon, and you’ll understand what we’re talking about.

Of course, Miiverse was heavily moderated, because think of the children. Anything that remotely resembled anything profane, sexual or political was removed instantly by vigilant moderators, ruling this tiny domain with an iron fist. It was far from a perfect service—it’s fair to say that Nintendo still has much to learn about creating an online infrastructure. But for its brief existence, Miiverse was a charming distraction that somewhat united Nintendo players who would otherwise may never have interacted with each other.

The Nintendo Switch’s lack of Miiverse is of little surprise—with Facebook and Twitter integration to the system software, Nintendo is making it obvious that they’d rather have players share their content on “real” social networks. But without their own dedicated centralized service, your Breath of the Wild accomplishments may be doomed to be lost within the sea of status updates and clickbait quizzes. But the spirit of Miiverse can live on—in fact, the hub drawings were such an integral element of Splatoon’s aesthetic that the Switch sequel added its own in-game system to create artwork. And boy, are there some good (and meme-y) stuff there.

Miiverse is ending services in November of this year. Nintendo of America has posted an FAQ on the matter, including information on how to save your Miiverse content. Check out the announcement for yourself here.

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