Leading up to the May 4th release of Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze on the Switch, one redditor decided to revisit the original title on Wii U this week and found it was missing from the eShop. I did a quick check and, sure enough, the “Buy Digital” link has been removed… but only in North America. The game is still available to download from both Nintendo Europe and Japan.
While the thinking is that the game was delisted in a nefarious push to get consumers to buy the more expensive Switch port, Archive.org shows it may have been removed a while ago. The last capture from February 25th is missing any reference to the eShop version. The latest capture that shows the download was available is from all the way back in October of 2017.
There’s still a lot of unaccounted for space between all of these dates so I’m going to wait before adding the game to the site in case this was all a big mistake. Maybe it’ll pop back up, say, a week after the Switch port has been out? I’ll circle back then and update. For now, the Wii U version remains available on physical media at around $30 in North America.