Nintendo has publicly announced the grim fate of the Wii Shop Channel. The service, which lets the Wii console purchase digital games, will end service on January 31, 2019. Ahead of that, users will no longer be able to add Wii Points to their account starting on March 27, 2018.
While those are hard dates, Nintendo noted that anything already purchased via WiiWare or Virtual Console will still be available to re-download. The Wii System Transfer will also continue to function, allowing data migration from the Wii to the Wii U. Unfortunately, those services will eventually be turned off at a later date. To that end, content will not be retrievable. So if you delete it from your console, it’s gone for good.
This is an inevitable move, most likely, but is a big example of why there are issues with our upcoming digital-only future. What happens when the servers shut down? The content goes away, and there are games on the Wii Virtual Console that did not reappear on other platforms.
Source: Gematsu