Club Nintendo Closing Down; New Program to Launch

Nintendo sent out a notice on Tuesday announcing that they were officially shutting down their loyalty program Club Nintendo by September, Game Spot reported.

Club Nintendo is the company's official rewards program and was launched in 2007. It served to supply free gifts and freebies to owners of the Wii, Wii U, DS and 3DS. However, Nintendo has decided to officially discontinue the program, and will instead launch a new rewards platform.

The announcement was posted on Nintendo's official website, Club Nintendo and sister sites in Japan, Australia, Europe and more.

"In order to focus on planning for a new customer loyalty program for our fans, we've decided to wind won the Club Nintendo program. We are deeply thankful to our members for being a part of Club Nintendo for all these years," the announcement read.

The team added that they will be releasing details about the new program at a later date, and instead released the schedule of their discontinuation timeframe, according to Kotaku.

On Apr. 1, Nintendo will no longer send out registration cards for their packaged games, meaning no more games will be registered with Club Nintendo.

On Apr. 20, the company will completely terminate the registration of digital products downloaded from the Nintendo eShop, as well as surveys for the downloaded software.

Sept. 30 will mark the official end of the Club Nintendo program and it will no longer be possible to sign up, log in, earn Stars or exchange them for gifts.

They also announced that handheld systems that are coming out after Feb. 13 cannot be registered in Club Nintendo, though hardware bundles are still allowed until Apr. 1 and software bundles until Sept. 30.

Because of this, Nintendo is urging gamers to start heading to the Stars Catalogue and exchange their Stars before Sept. 30, as Stars used and items earned will not be lost after the said date. They also stated that they will release more items over the coming months for gamers to spend Stars on.

As saddening as the news is, the loyalty program was never as popular in the United States compared to its counterpart in Japan, according to Ars Technica. Club Nintendo was originally Japan-exclusive until late 2008. While the U.S. program also gave out freebies, bonuses and gifts, Japan got most of the cooler items, such as exclusive games, soundtrack CDs and more.

Nintendo is planning a new loyalty program and hopefully fans will be able to patronize it as they did Club Nintendo.