WrenchNinja
Member
http://kotaku.com/5982965/nintendo-fan-is-unhappy-with-nintendos-200-answer-to-his-400-wii-u-problem
Mock if old.
Edit:
Jon is an enthusiastic Nintendo fan. He buys all of Nintendo's systems. He buys many, many Nintendo games. But he's gotten himself into a jam that he says has cost him access to more than $400 worth of downloadable games he's purchased from Nintendo over the several years.
How does one lose access to $400 worth of games?
Unfortunately for Jon, who asked that I not use his last name but who was hoping some coverage might wake Nintendo up about this issue, it doesn't seem to be that hard. It's partially a result of Nintendo's strict policies about downloadable gamespolicies that differ from other industry leaders such as Apple's, and don't seem set to change any time soon.
For several years, Jon used to download lots of old Virtual Console games to his Wii. He bought a bunch of Wii eShop games, too. Recently, with the enthusiasm any Nintendo fan has for a new Nintendo machine, he bought a Wii U. He set up a Nintendo ID on the system, transferred his Wii games to that Wii U and then discovered that he'd bought a lemon.
"My Wii U console would flash its red power light when I tried to turn it on," he told me in an e-mail. "I let it go for days, and kept trying. It just was not a reliable system."
At that point, what Jon should have done was contacted Nintendo. He didn't. He did something that seemed like a perfectly natural reflex: he took his Wii U back to the store he bought it from and swapped it for a new one. Problem solved? Not at all. He'd just created his new problem.
He took the new Wii U home and discovered he couldn't set up the same Nintendo ID he'd used on the first system. He had to make a new ID. Then, he said, he found out that he couldn't get those $400+ worth of games onto his new Wii U. They were locked to the broken one... the one he didn't have anymore. As far as Nintendo's online infrastructure was concerned, he wasn't the Jon of old. He was new, and he didn't have a right to those games.
"I called Nintendo and spent weeks talking to them about the problem," Jon said. "The lady, who helped me, was one of the nicest ladies, and was incredibly sweet to me. She wanted to help me, so I sent in my receipt to prove which systems I did the exchange for. After weeks of her reviewing everything, they gave me $200.00 of credit on the Wii U marketplace."
The problem with the $200 offer from Nintendo wasn't just that it was half of what Jon had spent. It's that the Wii U online shop is a different digital store than the Wii online shop. They use different online wallets. Both can be accessed via a Wii, but only onethe Wii shopsells the games Jon had already paid for and wanted to have access to again. That $200 of Wii U shop credit couldn't buy any of the $400 worth of games he'd bought.
Nintendo's own Wii U instruction manuals have also made clear that Nintendo IDs will lock content, though the company has suggested that users will someday be able to transfer their Nintendo IDsand, presumably the content locked to themfrom one device to another. If that was available to Jon, he wouldn't have a problem. But, I asked Nintendo, why does Nintendo lock content to an account that is locked to hardware? Why not adopt a system that allows the transfer of Nintendo IDs?
"Different companies take different approaches to preventing the resale of downloadable games," a rep for Nintendo of America told me in response to these questions. "Anyone who experiences any issues with a Nintendo system or game should contact Nintendo Customer Service at 800-255-3700 or http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/index.jsp. Once a system has been sold or traded in, and the system is no longer in possession of the original owner, the downloadable content cannot be recovered."
Mock if old.
Edit:
What a confusing thread! The guy I wrote about in the OP's post is not the guy in the second post. In fact, the guy in the second post e-mailed me about his happier encounter with Nintendo, which I'll post about on the site today. But, yeah, the original guy is still unable to access the $400 worth of games he downloaded.