Nintendo’s No-Transfer Policy Could Burn Wii’s Biggest Fans

With its release of a black Wii this week, Nintendo has tempted current owners of its videogame machine to trade their white consoles in for the slick new paint job.

There’s just one problem: Nintendo does not offer gamers a way to transfer games purchased online from one console to another. Neither the Wii nor Nintendo’s portable DSi consoles have an upgrade path for downloadable content, since games are tied not to user accounts but to specific machines. It’s impossible for a user to copy content from an old console to a new one. Even some Wii owners whose machines have malfunctioned said it was difficult, or impossible, to get Nintendo to transfer the software licenses at its headquarters.

“It shows extreme lack of foresight on their part,” says Wii owner Nathan Gillmore. “Did they really think the general public would be content to have all of their purchased content bound to a specific device?”

Like all modern-day gaming machines, Wii and DSi can download games directly from an online store. On Wii, which has added new titles to its store every week since 2006, Nintendo customers can choose from hundreds of titles — from classic Virtual Console games like Super Mario World to indie WiiWare titles like World of Goo. With games priced between $5 and $15, even a relatively modest WiiWare collection can represent a $1,000-plus investment.

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“Games and content are specific to each system, not user,” a Nintendo representative told Wired.com.

Princess Skittles, a user of the NeoGAF message boards who declined to give a real name, said she bought a black Wii console Sunday. She called Nintendo and talked them into transferring her large collection of downloaded games.

“Nintendo is doing a transfer for me as a special exception due to the amount of paid content I have,” she said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “They made it pretty clear that it’s usually reserved for repair scenarios but they were very nice and from the get-go they were happy to help me because of my support.”

To get the games transferred, Princess Skittles has to mail both of her Wii consoles to Nintendo, and wait two weeks, she said.

Some Wii owners aren’t so lucky.

Fernando Rodriguez says Nintendo refuses to help him transfer his content. Rodriguez, 27, lives in Puerto Rico and has owned three Wiis. His first, purchased on launch day, had just three games on it. After this one malfunctioned, he bought a second Wii and loaded it up with 24 downloaded games.

Fearing that this new Wii might be fried because of the poor electricity in his area, he bought a third Wii console as a backup. But when he called Nintendo to ask them to transfer his games to the new machine, he was met with resistance.

Rodriguez says that company representatives asked him for his credit card number and the date that he purchased the Wii Points cards that he used to buy the games. When he couldn’t give them the latter information, the Nintendo rep got suspicious, he told Wired.com in an e-mail.

“They said they couldn’t do anything since I had no evidence that I bought the Wii and games,” he said. “They basically implied that I stole the Wii, credit cards and everything else.”

Eventually, Rodriguez’s second Wii did die, and all of his games went with it.

Nintendo plans to unveil its next portable console, called 3DS, at next month’s E3 Expo in Los Angeles, releasing it in the next 12 months. It will be backward compatible with Nintendo DS titles. But there will be a lot of unhappy gamers if Nintendo does not also unveil a way for consumers to transfer their DSiWare downloads to the new machine.

To say nothing of what might happen to all those copies of Super Mario Bros. 3 when Nintendo ships its next Wii.