WiiU owner locked out of $400 of digital purchases

[Hawk]

pezus said:

Hawk said:

I might be missing something here, but when I transferred my data from my Wii to my Wii U, the system REPEATEDLY says this is a permanent process and that the games and account history will ONLY be accessible on the new Wii U system. Sooooooo, I think it's his own fault for not reading the MULTIPLE messages telling him this through the process and then just swapping the Wii U for another one.

I am glad Nintendo worked it out, that's a credit to Nintendo for good customer service. But yeah, the only one who was at fault was "Jon"

You ARE missing something indeed. How was he to know that the system would break down? 

"My Wii U console would flash its red power light when I tried to turn it on," he told me in an e-mail. "I let it go for days, and kept trying. It just was not a reliable system."

You can't transfer the data without being able to turn on the Wii U.  If the Wii U never turned on, the problem never would have happened.  It worked for a while at least and during the transfer process.