Yesterday, Nintendo finally launched their My Nintendo and Nintendo Accounts services– their long promised unified account services that would be hardware agnostic across all of their devices, as well as smartphones and PCs, and offer services such as media sharing, achievements, Cross Buy, Friends Lists, and unified purchase histories- the kind of stuff that should be standard, but Nintendo is only getting around to now.
The service launched only in Japan, and only partially- there was just an open registration portal, and we still don’t know when Nintendo’s devices themselves will be getting the services yet. What we also didn’t know was when the rest of the world could expect to get their hands on My Nintendo- until DualShockers very kindly reached out to Nintendo Australia for a comment, who confirmed that the service will launch in Australia and New Zealand in March.
“In Japan, Nintendo has launched its new Nintendo Account system. This preliminary launch represents a limited selection of the full functionality that Nintendo will eventually offer. This preliminary Nintendo Account launch is focused on bringing off-device purchase functionality to the Japanese market.
“This preliminary launch is limited to Japan. Nintendo Account and the new My Nintendo membership service will launch in Australia and New Zealand in March 2016.”
It sounds like the launch in Japan right now is highly limited- with the full launch coming much later. We could generally use the Australian launch as a good barometer to judge when the rest of the world might be getting these services too, but recent history has shown Australia often getting things far earlier than any other western territory- for instance, Australia and New Zealand got the New Nintendo 3DS models last year, shortly after the Japanese launches, while the west had to wait till February.
We’ll keep you posted.
