Nintendo's mini consoles will only be officially repairable as long as the parts last.
The company is sunsetting the repair programme for the twice-vintage consoles in Japan.
Nintendo's mini versions of the NES and SNES were sensations when they first came out eight and seven years ago respectively. Handy little modernised versions that made it easy but still engaging to play older games kicked off a craze with competitors releasing their own retro updates.
Now though, it's been a long enough time that Nintendo of Japan is taking at least one step back from the hardware (sold under the name Famicom there), by tailing off the repair programmes it's run for both all this time.
This doesn't mean an immediate closure, but rather that it'll only be able to do repairs on the consoles while it uses up the stock of parts that it already has. That means it's obviously a little hard to judge when repairs will formally stop being available.
The key caveat here is that this is only accurate at the time of writing for Nintendo of Japan – there's been no update on the topic from Nintendo of America or Europe as to its plans in those big regions.
That doesn't really point to the consoles staying repairable for ages, or following suit swiftly, as Nintendo has often demonstrated a bit of a gap between its Japanese and EU/US operations in the past.
If this does mean that eventually there won't be official repairs anywhere in the world, it'll mark one of the few times that game consoles like the NES and SNES have become obsolete twice. Their initial release window came to an end decades ago, after all, only for their mini versions to now reach the end of their support, too.
Luckily, those pining for another Nintendo console shouldn't have to wait too long for more news of a major one. After all, we know that the Nintendo Switch 2 is pretty imminent, and most analysts are expecting an announcement about it in the next couple of months. So, strap in for an all-new generation of Nintendo hardware to replace this much older one.
