Nintendo of Europe lying about forum closure?

Nintendo of Europe has just released a statement regarding the closure of their forums. This comes only days after Nintendo of America closed the NSider forums for good. In the statement, Nintendo of Europe now rationalizes their decision, rather than citing security problems.

Today we bring you news about certain changes to the Nintendo website. After we experienced some security issues in the past, the community forums have now been closed for good. (...)

When the forums launched we felt they were an essential service for our many loyal site visitors, and the response to them suggested you felt the same way. Since then, however, a number of other online Nintendo communities have surfaced. Dedicated solely to providing a place for Nintendo fans to meet and chat together, these forums are looked after by people who are able to focus all their resources in one area.

Given the growth of all these other online communities, we think visitors to our website would be best served if we focused all our energies on putting together a new Nintendo-Europe.com that will offer Club Nintendo members a number of new features for an expanded experience with our products. (...)

We hope you will enjoy all the exciting new features on the horizon.

I find the whole story very odd indeed. Nintendo had no good reason to ditch their online community in the US and Europe. The maintenance of such forums is neither difficult nor costly, while providing the company with plenty of benefits.

In the latter territory, the security problems originally given as a reason seem to have been a pretext. The chances of technical issues which necessitated the closure of the site coinciding with a general decision to abandon the forums are practically zero. It appears to me that they are lying in order to conceal their real motivation behind this move.

So, in line with some comments on this blog, I can only presume that Nintendo is preparing some kind of replacement community in the form of a Wii channel. This would tie in with the last secret Nintendo has been touting for at least a year.

Source: Nintendo of Europe
Thanks to: Βορέας