Nintendo Reveals What’s Replacing The Club Nintendo Program
Until this year, Nintendo had a rewards program in place called Club Nintendo. Whenever you bought a game, it came with a piece of paper with a code printed on it. You had to go to the Club Nintendo website, enter the code, fill out a survey about buying the game and then another one later about playing the game. For this, you got about ten or twenty points toward buying a hat or a poster. The whole process seemed archaic, but that’s just how Nintendo rolls…..traditionally, they’ve been very wary of any tech they didn’t invent themselves, as if it’ll bite them.
Club Nintendo was retired early in 2015 and we’ve been waiting since then for the promised replacement. It was worth the wait: it’s everything Club Nintendo should have been. Forget filling out forms….Nintendo Account (the new name) is so simple you won’t even have to think about it.
Once you sign up for a Nintendo Account, it will automatically sense the games you play on the Wii U, the 3DS and the upcoming NX, and send you information about the games, sometimes even free content. You can access your Nintendo Account anywhere, through any Nintendo device, your computer, a smartphone or a tablet. Nintendo is also introducing cloud save storage through Nintendo Account, something I never expected the company to dabble in. Your account will also work with Facebook and Twitter….and since Nintendo Account has its own friends list, this may be the end of Friend Codes for good!
Some questions remain unanswered. The biggest issue with Nintendo devices right now is that everything you purchase digitally is tied to one machine and if that machine is lost, you’re expected to buy everything all over again. Nintendo Account should have the ability to fix this problem in theory, but Nintendo has not stated outright that it does. We’ll let you know.