The original Wii Shop channel is officially shutting down on January 31st, 2019. Announced today on the Japanese Nintendo website, the shutdown is still a ways off. Wii owners have until March 27th, 2018 to add more Wii Shop points to their accounts. On January 31st, 2019 the Wii Shop channel will no longer be accessible. You’ll still be able to re-download WiiWare, Virtual Console and other games you’ve already purchased after the shutdown. Users will also still have the ability to transfer their Wii downloads to a Wii U using the System Transfer option. Nintendo did state that the option to re-download purchased games along with the System Transfer feature will be shutdown in the future.
Nintendo has been supporting the original Wii Shop channel for sometime now (since 2006). The channel originally only sold Virtual Console games, but soon Nintendo added WiiWare games, Netflix, Hulu and other streaming apps to the channel’s offering. In Japan they even had a special channel for online shopping. Last summer Nintendo announced that users wouldn’t be able to add new DSi points to the DSi Shop channel. The fact that the Wii’s shop channel lasted this long is absolutely amazing.