Starting in September, the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS versions of the Nintendo eShop will no longer allow customers in the EU and UK to use credit cards for purchases directly through their devices. The change only affects the company’s two older systems and not the Nintendo Switch’s game store.
Moving forward, adding eShop funds in the EU and UK with a credit card will need to be done from a computer via a Nintendo Account, rather than the previous option of using a credit card directly through the eShop application installed on each system.
Nintendo of Europe announced the upcoming change in a brief tweet, and neither the tweet nor the support article it linked to offered much explanation for the sudden change. As some replies to that tweet point out, the September deadline does line up with the compliance date for the European Commission’s new rules for payment service providers, however.
This phase of that rule change includes new requirements for stronger customer authentication for electronic payment transactions and secure communication by payment service providers, something that the older systems in place on the Wii U and 3DS may not have been capable of on their own.