Free Plays may end up with the Nintendo Arcade badge in perpetuity

Players have reported that Free Plays has ended on the Freemium 3DS Nintendo Badge Arcade app.

More so than the 3DS subreddit, users were playing the game in order to cash in on their free plays only to find out there wasn’t any. Several users started reporting this yesterday, with European players also face this issue today.

One of the earliest reports came from the user Machajouki 1971and many others followed suit, lamenting another phase of the 3DS’s life being cut short.

We made sure to log into the Nintendo Badge Arcade after finding out, and can report that unfortunately we also didn’t get any free plays for the first time this week. At least you can still pay to play. However, we also noticed that the Final Day stickers have been removed from all in-game devices.

After doing some digging, it looks like this could actually be a bug rather than another nail in the coffin of the 3DS’ life. Pretendo Network – Free, open-source software designed to replace the 3DS Network and Wii U eShop Network – Dug into the Nintendo Badge Arcade configuration files, and the dates in the download data appear to be wrong. The last day in data is March 23, 2023.

The files were created on March 16, a day earlier than usual, and as such, Pretendo believes this is all just a mistake.

Well, apparently it’s not intentional, but the real question is will it be fixed? Since the doors of the 3DS eShop close on March 27th, we’re not quite sure, but we’d love it if an act. Imagine!

Let us know your thoughts on this in the comments.