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What is Miiverse?
Miiverse was a social media platform that was a part of the Nintendo Network, Nintendo's online gaming service, which allowed players to communicate with one another. Miiverse was launched on November 18, 2012 on the Nintendo Wii U, on April 24, 2013 for the browsers and December 9, 2013 for the Nintendo 3DS.
Anyone who used a Nintendo Wii U or 3DS online could be considered a Miiverse user however, Miiverse was much more of a prominent feature on the Wii U. Every time a user turned on their Wii U they entered directly into the Wara Wara Plaza which showed not only games that they had recently played but also games that were popular with other Wii U owners. You could even see what other users were saying about the games they were playing through their Mii, their player avatar, which showed the users posts about a game as little speech bubbles above the Mii's head.
The purpose of Miiverse was to "make communicating about the games you're playing more enjoyable than ever!" (Miiverse Guide: Tom) The Miiverse was dedicated to making communication and community building between players easier than ever. Players had the ability to post about their achievements in games, attach screen shots to their posts and write notes to post in the game for other users to read.
Miiverse posts could consist of up to 180 characters of text and could be accompanied by either a screenshot, a hand drawn picture or a game play video of what the user was playing.
One of the stand out features of the Miiverse was how users posted to it. Users were able to post directly from the game they were playing automatically to that game's community forum. This made navigating the platform fairly simple since all a user had to do in order to see the latest posts in a community's forum would be to either play the game associated with that community or go to the Miiverse application on their console and select the forum they wish to view, as seen below.
The Miiverse on the 3DS was more of a bonus feature rather than a main focus of the console, but there were several games that used the Miiverse to utilize some of their key features. The 3DS version of the Miiverse also had several draw backs that made it more difficult to use than the Wii U version. The main difference between the two versions is that you could not post directly from games in the 3DS version. In the 3DS version of the app users had to exit their games and open the Miiverse app just to make a post.
This made posting from the 3DS a bit more inconvenient when compared to just hitting one button in the console pause menu in the Wii U version.
After 6 years of helping gamers form communities, Nintendo announced that they would be shutting down the Miiverse on November 7, 2017. This came as a bit of a surprise to people in the larger gaming community. For some, this was akin to Facebook getting rid of its Messenger application, the site as a whole is still useable but without messenger it loses a key feature that many use the site for.