Club Nintendo To Be Discontinued

Bad news for those who are fans of Club Nintendo as the company has revealed plans to scrap the service on April 20th 2015. Better use those stars eh?

Ever opened a Nintendo game and seen a paper insert with a code on it? Well you won't for much longer as the Stars Catalogue and Club Nintendo itself will be discontinuing it's service before the end of the year!

If you've bought an official Nintendo game in the last few years, you may have noticed a red sheet of paper inside and with that, a special code you could type in on the Nintendo website that would reward you for your legitimate Nintendo published game purchases. These codes would add stars to your account which could then be traded in for exclusive Nintendo themed items, some of them amazing, like statues and replica Mario hats, others not so great like PC wallpapers and mobile phone ringtones, either way, free stuff! But that's all set to change this year as Club Nintendo is being closed down.

Old inserts used to be a lot more colourful

As of April 20th you will no longer be able to redeem your codes, so if you have any left over, key them in before that date and on September 30th the service will be shut down completely. Nintendo have stated that new items will continue to be added to the current store, so don't rush to spend all your points just because you can.

While the Club Nintendo service itself is ending, the reward scheme will develop into something new before the end of the year. For anyone who registers with whatever the new service will end up being, you'll receive a free copy of Flipnote Studio 3D which we covered here way back in 2013.

Bit of history for you if you're interested, Club Nintendo originally started out as NintendoVIP 24:7 way back in 2002 and coincided with the launch of the GameCube, the service changed its name to Club Nintendo in 2007 when the Wii was launched. Every Nintendo published product would ship with a paper sleeve with a PIN code that you could enter onto the site which would give you star points to redeem, with codes being issued with GameCube and Gameboy Advance games, the service continued on with the full Nintendo DS range including the original DS, DSi, 2DS and 3DS as well as both the Wii and Wii U. This wasn't just limited to physical copies of games as downloadable titles were automatically added to your Club Nintendo account provided you had linked the service to your console.

Free stuff is always the best stuff

While I've been in the ecosystem since day one, I'm not really that sad to see it go, the stars catalogue was a good idea to reward loyal customers and I got a Zelda themed notepad, some Wii store credit which I used to download a bunch of games and several packs of Kid Icarus AR cards, but the real prizes that I actually wanted cost a huge amount of star points and always seemed to be out of stock. Points used to last forever as well, but when Nintendo changed the point system to only be valid for a year from when you registered games,

I stopped bothering to register my games. There was always promise to bring further products into the catalogue as well, but I never saw anything that I'd really wanted. Maybe I'll go back and put all my old games on there now seeing as I've come across a whole bunch of unclaimed codes.

So what do you think about the end of Club Nintendo? Sad to see it go or are you looking forward to seeing some changes? Let me know on Twitter @chaosriotzero or tell us here in the comments below or over on our social media outlets

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