Nintendo: Flipnote Studio 3D’s World Gallery (Japan) and Splatoon’ SplatNet to be discontinued
A few days ago, Nintendo announced that Miiverse, Nintendo TVii (in Japan), and Wii U Chat would soon be discontinued. And it looks like the company has decided to make some cleaning in its various online services, because it’s been announced that two more would be discontinued in the (more or less near) future: the World Gallery in Flipnote Studio 3D (only available in Japan), and SplatNet.
SplatNet is a companion website for Splatoon, that allows you to do the following:
- Check the online status of your friends or see who you’re battling with!
- Set Battle Plans – If you’re playing Splatoon at the time you set, you’ll automatically tweet to your followers to let them know you’re playing
- Check Your Rank – Win battles to raise your weekly rank
- Check out the gear and weapons you have equipped while playing online!
- View the current and upcoming stage info to guide your weapon selection and battle strategy!
Unfortunately, this service is to be discontinued at the end of the month, on September 30th to be precise. Of course, you will still be able to play online, with random players or friends: only the extra services provided by SplatNet will be shut down… for now, at least. And naturally, SplatNet 2 for Splatoon 2 will not be impacted by this.
As for World Gallery, it’s a feature not available in the European and North American versions of Flipnote Studio 3D, that allows you to share your creations with other people via the internet, and more precisely Nintendo’s servers (in-game). It’s not free: you need to buy tickets to use it, though popular creators can get free credits when they get lots of views.
The World Gallery feature will be discontinued in two parts:
- first, on October 2nd (10AM JST), tickets will no longer be available for purchase
- then, on April 2nd, the service will be fully discontinued
Once tickets sale has stopped, Nintendo will increase the amount of time you can use the service for free, and you will receive more coins.
Nintendo specifies that all the other, non-online features of Flipnote Studio 3D will be available as usual even after World Gallery is discontinued. If you want to share your creations via the internet, you will still be able to do so, but you will have to use a third-party hosting service.
Europe and North America are not impacted by this, because as mentioned above, World Gallery is not available in the European and North American versions of the app to begin with.
