Nintendo is so proud of the feature that it even included a little C button right on your Joy-Con (which was a point of excited speculation before the reveal) so you can jump into Game Chat whenever you like.

Unfortunately, it also tried to bury the fact that this Game Chat feature will actually require a Nintendo Switch Online subscription once the free trial period ends on March 31, 2026.

Now, you may be wondering what the button does if you don’t have a subscription? Thankfully, Nintendo’s vice president of player and product experience, Bill Trinen, was interviewed by Polygon on that very same topic. Trinen explains that the button will let you “find out about the NSO subscription there and get a sense of some of the functionality.” It’s basically a button that asks you to pay up.

It’s basically a button that asks you to pay up

We’ve gotten to the point where button functions are microtransactions…

This is why I emulate games and just use Linux

  • wowbaggerip@lemmy.worldEnglish
    415·
    7 hours ago

    Everyone defending Nintendo in here for their online subscription fees are actually the mildly infuriating part for me personally. I’m a game developer and once attempted to develop an online game on Switch and other consoles. It was surprising to me to learn that exactly zero of the profits they rake in from their player base goes towards providing any server architecture whatsoever for developers on the platforms to use. This means that all costs associated with hosting servers for online functionality of games on the platform are the responsibility of each developer.

    I fail to see what service they are providing apart from enabling players to access the Internet on a device they already paid for. I really don’t think players understand this.

    I also think it’s important to point out that it’s at least twice as difficult to get a game through Nintendo Lotcheck aka certification if you have any online features whatsoever due to their extreme requirements, which ends up costing a lot more development time. Steam on the other hand has an almost non existent certification process and charges players nothing to access the Internet.

    I will end my rant with one more important point. I had my switch stolen a while back. I had been playing Animal Crossing for years, all through the pandemic and had a very nicely curated island and house. I had been paying for Nintendo Online monthly and had my island backed up. However I didn’t purchase a new switch right away due to financial reasons and speed thought it foolish to keep paying my Nintendo Online membership so I canceled. After about 2 years I saw they announced a new update and finally had some extra money so I found a used Switch online. To my dismay, even though I reactivated my Nintendo Online subscription, Nintendo deleted my entire cloud save data repository for all my games, including Animal Crossing due to having not paid in over 12 months. This is unacceptable. Steam has not charged me a penny for online cloud service in all my years of having an account which started back on in the days of CS1.6. They have every save data file for every game I’ve ever played with zero threat of deletion. I cannot believe Nintendo thinks they were justified in deleting my data. I had to start Animal Crossing over from scratch. Needless to say I will not be subscribing to Nintendo Online ever again. Do not trust them with your data.

    • musicalphysics@discuss.onlineEnglish
      23·
      2 hours ago

      How long should Nintendo save your data when you aren’t paying them? Why should they keep it for any length of time?

      Nintendo has qualification processes because bad games almost destroyed the industry in the 80s.

      Steam doesn’t ensure quality. How would steam possibly try to charge for internet access on a device they didn’t produce, control, or sell you?

      Businesses charge users for things that users value. Simple as that. It isn’t unique to Nintendo or the games industry. Cell phone folks charged for texts that didn’t cost them anything to deliver. Why? People valued texts and were willing to pay. We got out of that because of Apple but now people are angry at Apple about it.

    • mlem@startrek.websiteEnglish
      5·
      6 hours ago

      It was surprising to me to learn that exactly zero of the profits they rake in from their player base goes towards providing any server architecture whatsoever for developers on the platforms to use.

      To me this was always the most insane part. Like I would pay for e.g. Xbox Live if it is stable, free of cheaters, etc. but they will not get me to pay for peer-to-peer how it’s with Nintendo’s own games. :O

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      3·
      6 hours ago

      Also, Steam being open means you can also use an app like Ludusavi to make your own savegame backups, just in case.