Yesterday Nintendo launched its much anticipated new Nintendo Account system in Japan. It wasn’t a full feature rollout but some elements like linking your NNID and using your social media accounts to login are now available. You also can also now purchase games from the Japanese website and have them download to your Wii U or 3DS – pretty cool. Here’s some of their statement.

This preliminary launch represents a limited selection of the full functionality that Nintendo will eventually offer.

This preliminary Nintendo Account launch is focused on bringing off-device purchase functionality to the Japanese market.

So we asked Nintendo Australia when we can expect to see such functionality roll out here . They confirmed to us that this launch is just for Japan for now and;

“Nintendo Account and the new My Nintendo membership service will launch in Australia and New Zealand in March 2016”.

We suspect this will apply for other regions outside of Japan, but we’ll wait for word from Nintendo of America and Europe.

It’s cool to see Nintendo Account launch in Japan, I don’t think anyone expected it this early – time to revise those expectations and let Japan ‘beta test’ it!