Homebrew version of Wii Shop enters public beta under name RiiShop

UPDATE: Several reports have come in about issues in the RiiShop Discord concerning developers on the project. The Discord channel for the RiiShop has been discountinued as a result. We recommend not downloading this homebrew at this time.

It may be time to dust off the Wii in your closet and slap some AA's in the Wii Remote. The Wii Shop is coming back, thanks to homebrew.

A team of developers has been working on a homebrew app for the Nintendo Wii dubbed LaunchShop. The aim of the app was to accurately recreate the Wii Shop service, including the UI, menus, and Wii Points system. That project has been renamed the RiiShop and is now available for download as a public beta and can be installed to the retro Nintendo console (which you can buy renewed at Amazon).

To install the RiiShop, you'll need a Wii that has been modified to run homebrew (which is a simple process at this point). Once your Wii has been jailbroken to run homebrew, you can download the RiiShop WAD from the RiiShop Discord server (link below), transfer to an SD card, and install it on your Wii via a WAD management app.

RiiShop is currently in a beta state, which means not everything will work. For example, multiple users are reporting that WiiWare, Virtual Console titles, and apps are not downloadable at this time. One of the goals of RiiShop is to re-instate all of the titles that were once available on the Wii Shop prior to its termination in 2019, making the experience a carbon copy of the original Wii Shop's. The developers have articulated that RiiShop will be free and there will be no monetary transactions; downloads (once working) will instead be handled via fake Wii Points.

The menus, icons, and music are all the exact same as those on the original Wii Shop, and the RiiShop team has done a good job with the recreation. The app is under active development.