Discontinuation of Club Nintendo

Today it was announced that Nintendo is to discontinue Club Nintendo the place where you can go and spend all of your collected stars from the scratch cards contained in select games and consoles.

It's kind of a shame that it is to be closed down as there can sometimes be some good stuff on there such as the Link and Epona statue, the celebration cards and especially the SNES Wii controller that I managed to scrape enough stars together to get a while back.


That was one of the problems with the system though, unless you bought every Nintendo product new that contained the stars then it was a struggle to get enough stars together to try and get anything good from the top end of the store. Another minor or major problem (depending on how you looked at it) was the requirement to complete the same survey every single time you registered a product and I mean every single time. I once registered between five to ten products in one go, I still sometimes come out in sweats when I see an online survey.

Also, the lower end of the stars market could be pretty poor with items such as a ring tone or digital wallpaper for fifty stars or one hundred Wii points for 400 stars. Unless you had some stars to use up it was pretty much a waste to use them on these items.

As I say though it was the top end of the store where you could find all the good stuff and at time of writing there are such items as a Mario Kart 8 t-shirt, Mario Kart 8 badge set and a Game & Watch, items that are worth the collecting.

Yes the Club Nintendo has it's flaws but when it has the good stuff it really has the good stuff and that's why I think that it's a shame that it is being discontinued. Hopefully it's replacement will be better and still offer the good stuff.

Just in case people were not aware below is the schedule for closure.

Club Nintendo Discontinuation Schedule

• April 1st 2015: From this date, Nintendo will no longer include product registration cards with its packaged games, so such products cannot be registered in Club Nintendo. You may still find product registration cards in games that were in stock before this date, however.
• April 20th 2015: Termination of the registration of digital products downloaded from Nintendo eShop. Digital products obtained from Nintendo eShop after this date will no longer appear in the My Registered Games & Systems page in Club Nintendo. In addition, surveys for download software titles will no longer be available.
• September 30th 2015: End of Club Nintendo programme. All Club Nintendo features, such as signing up as a new member, logging in as a registered member, earning Stars, and exchanging Stars for items from the Stars Catalogue will no longer be possible from this date.