3DS eShop couldn’t handle the pressure of the New Super Mario Bros. 2 launch

Nintendo’s been making a bit of a fuss over how it’s finally stepping into the future and preparing to offer downloads of its retail games through the 3DS’ eShop. There have been numerous announcements made and it’s offering double the Club Nintendo points to people who download rather that buy a cartridge. Recent events in Japan suggest that the move to digital might not be such a smooth process for Nintendo.

This past weekend, New Super Mario Bros 2, as well as the Brain Age spin-off Dr. Kawashima’s Demon Training were both released in Japan. It happened on July 28, 2012 to be exact. Almost immediately after both downloads were released at 9am JST, the entire eShop went down. Nintendo cited server problems, which were probably caused by a rush of people attempting to download one or both games from the eShop instead of heading out to buy a cartridge.

The eShop outage lasted just under three hours. So it isn’t like it was some kind of disaster. It was more like a minor hiccup. Still, it’s enough to question whether or not Nintendo is still prepared for this whole “download” thing. I guess we’ll have to see what happens on August 19, 2012! That’s when New Super Mario Bros. 2 appears on the North American eShop. Perhaps Nintendo knows what went wrong now and will take measures to ensure it doesn’t repeat itself for the North American or European launches.

Read [Andriasang]