Lets Talk About Miiverse

What was Lost when the Miiverse Shutdown?

In recent years, Nintendo has been building their brand on the idea that games are a social experience. This can be seen in how the company has marketed their consoles. The most recent example of this was the release trailer for the Nintendo Switch. The focus of the commercial is to demonstrate the interactions that are possible thanks to the Switch.

The Miiverse was one of the company's biggest steps in establishing the idea that gaming can be used to bring people together. By creating an online community for gamers to get together and discuss the games they were playing Nintendo was on the forefront of a major social networking boom in the gaming community. While game consoles allow users to post to their current social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter, Miiverse was a platform that was specifically dedicated specifically to video games.

When Miiverse shut down gamers lost several key functions in multiple games across the Wii U and 3DS libraries. According to Brian Crecente at Rolling Stone "more than 100 games are being impacted by the discontinuation."

One example of this negative impact is Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars for the Wii U and 3DS. The Miiverse allows players to share levels they created with other people playing the game. According to Brendan Graeber "This is where Tipping Stars gets its name: you can both collect stars from completing a community-made stage and give them to a stage's creator as a "tip" for a job well done. These stars can be used to unlock more tools and cosmetic changes in the workshop." When the Miiverse shut down users can no longer collect these stars and thus were unable to finish the game.

However, the bigger loss to the gaming community than affected gameplay was the loss of community. When Miiverse shut down all the communities that have built up around the games on the platform shut down as well.

When Nintendo shut down the Miiverse they overlooked the unique qualities of their service that drew in several of their customers. Nintendo was ahead of the curve with its implementation of community building features on its consoles. The other two major console developers, Microsoft and Sony, only have simple messaging functions, but the Miiverse allowed for full-fledged communities to develop and exist on game consoles for the first time. By shutting down the Miiverse, Nintendo has regressed as a platform and lost a feature that made them truly unique.

The closure of the Miiverse forced users to search elsewhere for places to discuss the games they love. While this is not a very difficult thing to do on the internet because of sites like Reddit, which is similar to Miiverse in that both are designed to help build communities around a specific topic, it is much more convenient to post directly from the game you are playing and see the responses in the game and it is also more accessible to a younger audience. Most children have limited access to forum sites like Reddit due to their adult content. When Miiverse shut down it drastically limited children's ability to take part in online communities and could possibly prevent them from building the social skills that they will need in an online community.

After the closure of the Miiverse was announced a group named Archive Team announced that they would be archiving every post from the Miiverse in an effort to preserve the community. According to Kyle Orland from ars Technica, the group collected "nearly 17 terabyte backup of hundreds of millions of posts, screenshots, and drawings from the over 8 million users that made Miiverse such a weird and special place" which people can now search through (Orland, 2018). This information could be incredibly useful going forward since researchers can study every post from the service and see how these posts contributed to the community as a whole. It would also allow researchers to track a user's development from the time they started using the service to the shutdown to see how their communication skills developed over time as a result of being involved in this community.