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Just a few days ago, Nintendo officially shuttered online services for the Wii U and 3DS. This means you can’t hop online to play any of the online-enabled games for those platforms, which is definitely quite a bummer. Unfortunately, it seems the situation is even worse when it comes to 3DS.

Some 3DS owners are finding out the hard way that select pieces of DLC cannot be redownloaded following the end of online services. More often than not, gamers are able to redownload in perpetuity both games and DLC they purchased prior to online service shutdowns. With the 3DS, it seems some titles like Smash Bros. 3DS and various Monster Hunter games are having issues grabbing that DLC post-shutdown.

It’s unclear as to whether Nintendo intended for things to work this way or if this is a mistake. Either way, customers aren’t happy that they paid for DLC and now have no way of accessing it. We’ll keep an eye on the situation to see if Nintendo fixes things up or makes a statement on the matter.

Thanks to Edbova for the heads up!

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Comments (5)

ngamer01

22d ago

The DLC going away was intended since Sakurai pleaded anyone wanting Smash 4 DLC needed to act ASAP. Same with the Monster Hunter social media people in regards to the Wii U & 3DS Monster Hunter games. Since there was no way to move the DLC to the eShop servers on Wii U/3DS, there was nothing to be done unless devs/pubs allowed Nintendo to host the content files directly from the start instead of getting seperate servers for distributing content purposes.

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mock turtle

22d ago

The sooner people are willing to admit this behavior is anti-consumer, the sooner we can start lobbying for laws against this crap.


Problem with this. Hollywood views stuff like that as anti-copyright so they'll flood the US Congress with lobbying against any copyright reform. Hollywood has owned the US Congress for decades.

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linkedtriforce

20d ago

@ngamer01

I believe Sakurai urging people to get Smash 4 DLC was aimed at people who didn’t already own it. This article is talking about people trying to redownload DLC they already own, which is supposed to be possible. When the Wii Shop and 3DS/Wii U eShop were shut down, you could still redownload games you already bought…even to this day I believe.
I think this DLC not being re-downloadable for people who already own it is unintended and will be fixed, but we’ll see.


Still copyright. If a license expires and there wasn't an agreement to allow buyers to keep their digital purchases, everything gets pulled until a copyright license renewel is done (which usually is never).

If Nintendo tried protecting Smash 4 purchases without a copyright license they will be sued for infringement. The same deal with the expired Monster Hunter stuff you can't get again if you delete the stuff no longer offered in the relevant MH games. Capcom wants no infringement lawsuits.

If people tried to get Congress to do something, Hollywood will join to stop it. So this problem will be forever. :/

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