Hold Off On Trading In Your Wii For A Wii U If You Want To Be Able To Keep Your Data

GameStop may be offering a trade-in bonus on your Wii right now, but you may not want to rush to trade up for a shiny new Wii U just yet.

Wii owners will be able to transfer their data — including saved games and purchased Wii Shop titles — from their Wii to their new Wii U, but there's a catch. Both consoles, old and new, will need to be connected at the same time to do it.

Gimme Gimme Games reports that according to Nintendo:

Wii U owners can wirelessly transfer content such as Miis, and WiiWare and Virtual Console games to their Wii U systems. Both systems will need to be connected to the Internet and the Wii U will need an SD card to facilitate the transfer. The process is very similar to transferring content from Nintendo DS to Nintendo 3DS or from Nintendo 3DS to Nintendo 3DS XL

While it's great news that users can easily transfer their data, the timing will no doubt leave something to be desired for many console owners looking to upgrade this November.

Don't trade in your Wii yet! Nintendo confirms that you'll need both your old Wii and Wii U to transfer data/games between systems [Gimme Gimme Games]


    Sooo... If someone ( lets say, ME) wanted to keep the Wii as-is, with all of the Virtual Console games intact, in another room, O can't have those same games available on the WiiU? It's one or the other, not both?

      Most likely not. At the moment, Wii and 3DS shop purchases are tied to the system they were bought from. Once the Nintendo Network is rolled out to the 3DS, purchases will then be associated with a user account (I assume retroactively), and it'll be the same for the Wii U.
      I doubt the Wii will get any future firmware updates to add Nintendo Network account association for downloaded purchases.
      If you wanted to keep the digital games on the Wii, you'd have to buy them again on the Wii U.
      If you have a friend who is also getting a Wii U though... well, I'm fairly certain there will be limit as to how many consoles a digital game can be activated on.

      You can, you just have to buy them again! ;)

    I wonder if the Homebrew Channel will transfer over along with the rest of my WiiWare...

      I thought about that if I traded it in (which I won't bother doing).
      New owner calls EB - "Hey, how does this homebrew channel work".
      EB - What?

        eb format them and erase everything so no dice there

          Can they even do that seeing as I tinkered with the BIOS?

      man this site badly needs a thumbs up button

        Why? Homebrew was pretty awesome. Nintendo even ripped off some of the features people developed, like gaming stats.

    Why not make a computer software that extracts the data and send the data to Wii U like how PS3 and Vita do it?

    I traded in my 3DS for the XL model. The guy at EB gave me two choices, do the transfer in store with their WIFI or take it home, do all the transferring magic, and bring it back within a week. I'm going to assume if you ask they'll work out something with you, it's not like EB is going to give up on a chance to get you to trade in an anything.

      I did the same, paid for it outright $270 including NSMB2 took it home did the transfer. Took the old 3DS in and got refunded $130, I thought that was an ok deal.

    this really annoys me and is one of the reasons i dont have a 3DS and a 3DS xl.
    im sorry to say but in the post iphone era people expect that digital purchases can be used on multiple devices linked to the same account.
    my iphone's/ipad does it, my xbox 360's do it. i want my nintendo hardware to do it. its already bad enough at the price of some of nintendos digital downloads but then to also have reduced flexibility to traditional physical formats is just stupid and needs to be fixed ASAP

    At least let me extract onto an SD card or something!


    Why does the WiiU need an SD card for it? It already has internal memory why can't it just transfer the stuff there

    What would you get for a Wii trade in?? About $40-50 if you were lucky. Why bother i ask?

    I'm keeping my Wii, just cos it's red. Plus, I need something to play my Gamecube discs on!

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