Mario Kart 8 & Splatoon Back on Wii U and 3DS

Last Updated on February 7, 2024

Online gaming for two of Nintendo’s top Wii U games has now been returned to gamers after an intrusive attacking situation led to forced emergency maintenance by Nintendo five months ago.

This catalysed from an exploit called ‘ENLBufferPwn’ which was detected during online gameplay, whereby attackers were given the opportunity to obtain remote control access to victim consoles. With the vulnerability all patched up, the Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon are back online for players.

Nintendo have also been able to save Switch titles Nintendo Switch Sports, Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Splatoon 3 online gameplay from unsafe hacking back in December 2022. Despite things looking good for now, any further issues that could appear may cause the service to close in its entirety. You can read more about how these hacking attacks were executed from our article: Confirmed: Nintendo Vulnerabilities Affect 3DS, Wii U, and Switch Games.

In other news, since the 3DS eShop closure earlier this year it seems fans still can’t get enough of 3DS games! After the closure, Nintendo sold over a whopping 200,000 3DS games over the course of the past three months as detailed on Nintendo’s official financial data. Since the last update whereby 75.94 million units were going and staying relatively intact, software sales increased from 391.38 million to 391.59 million which does not sound like a lot but it highlights the 3DS’s sturdy foundations at the moment. As digital games are no longer legally available for purchase, so these numbers logically must consist of physical games. .

Before eShop closure there was an increase of 1.28 million sales as addressed by Stephen Totilo (Axios Gaming) on Twitter.

The same cannot be said for the Wii U, however. The number of games sold as it was released after the 3DS in 2012 were not as significant compared to its estimated statistics. Online gameplay is still supported for now. When they are looking to start closing the service is not certain yet. However, rest assured that the 3DS is not totally finished yet and still going strong!

(NintendoLife | Polygon)

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