Club Nintendo, the loyalty program of the japanese company, is coming to an end. The sad news was released on Nintendo's official site today. Nintendo is going to discontinue the service this April. The silver lining here is that they're working on a new customer loyalty program to be released later this year to replace Club Nintendo.
For those of you unfamiliar with the program, club Nintendo allowed its members to redeem codes from cards included in many Nintendo products and complete surveys in exchange for coins, that could be later exchanged for physical or downloadable rewards. Users in the US and Canada will be able to collect coins until the end of March, and will be able to redeem prizes until the end of June. For Europe the discontinuation schedule is as follows:
- April 1st 2015: From this date, Nintendo will no longer include product registration cards with its packaged games, so such products cannot be registered in Club Nintendo. You may still find product registration cards in games that were in stock before this date, however.
- April 20th 2015: Termination of the registration of digital products downloaded from Nintendo eShop. Digital products obtained from Nintendo eShop after this date will no longer appear in the My Registered Games & Systems page in Club Nintendo. In addition, surveys for download software titles will no longer be available.
- September 30th 2015: End of Club Nintendo programme. All Club Nintendo features, such as signing up as a new member, logging in as a registered member, earning Stars, and exchanging Stars for items from the Stars Catalogue will no longer be possible from this date.
These new handheld systems, which will be released on February 13th 2015, are not registerable in Club Nintendo. However, hardware bundles will still include a product registration card for the included software until April 1st 2015, so software bundled with hardware can still be registered until September 30th 2015.Nintendo will add more physical reward options as well as more downloadable games in the reward catalogue in February, to allow members to have the best opportunity to spend their last coins for something awesome.
Nintendo have a new custom loyalty program in the works. We have little information on it aside that it will be available later this year. A piece of information about it that we have, however, is that Nintendo will give a free downloadable copy of Flipnote 3D for Nintendo 3DS to those that will subscribe to the new program.
Are you a member of Club Nintendo? What are your hopes for the new program? Tell us in the comments.