Nintendo announced on January 20 that it will be shutting down its Club Nintendo this year after more than six years in operation. Although the company did not say why, it did say that it will be listing additional games and other rewards that can be redeemed during February in an effort to help users clear out their remaining balance of reward points.
Late last night, which would have been early morning for the Japan-based company, Nintendo listed its final wave of rewards for users to redeem. Currently, there are 118 games listed for download: 42 Wii U, 28 Wii and 48 for the Nintendo 3DS. There are also a dozen physical prizes that include posters, clothing, puzzles, greeting cards and other items.
For anyone who has saved up a lot of reward points, now seems to be a great time to take advantage of the service and grab some free games or a t-shirt, but unfortunately, many users are currently not able to. Not long after adding the new selections to the reward catalog, the Club Nintendo servers became over loaded with traffic.
Since that time, the website has had unstable access. In our attempts to access the website, the page stalled after several minutes and didn't load. After several more attempts, the catalog finally loaded, and we could look it over. When we tried to select a game, though, most of the time we were met with this:
On rare occasions the site did make it to the product page, but somewhere along the way, from logging in to checking out, we would be met again with an error message stating that the server is either down for maintenance or experiencing heavy traffic and cannot continue.
Nintendo is likely already aware of the problem and currently working to resolve the issue, but it could still take several days before users will be able to access the website and cash in their reward points.
Any users who still have reward points to add to their account, or who have yet to make an account, have until March 31 to sign up and add points. The rewards currently listed are expected to stay until June 30, and Club Nintendo is expected to close down not long after the final series of Gold and Platinum rewards to users who have achieved this status.
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