Nintendo’s poorly handled paid-online rollout

Nintendo was widely expected to officially announce paid online for the Switch in their Nintendo Direct this week. The conference has since been put on hold due to a pair of tragic natural disasters that have struck Japan in recent days. What’s waiting a few extra days though when we’ve already gone a year and a half without proper online services.

The House of Mario is the lone console holdout when it has come to paid online services. It’s free option though is certainly nothing to brag about.

While Nintendo has offered online play since the Wii, the service has never really matured to the point where it’s… usable. It reminds me of the early of days of PSN. Though at least Sony was able to substantially improve their service before they started asking money for it.

Nintendo has been fairly vague regarding what their new online service will offer. We know that it will cost $20 for the year, which will allow you to play games online. Something the Switch already does for free. 

Probably the biggest feature so far announced is cloud saves. The Switch does not allow you to back up your game saves to local media. So if you don’t want to lose your progress in Breath of the Wild, that $20 is certainly tempting. Locking save backups behind a paywall screams “chintzy”, so hopefully a local storage feature will be added in the Switch’s upcoming Firmware 6.0.0. 

On top of that, you’ll get some “free” NES games as a bonus for signing up. The same NES games you probably already own on half a dozen different platforms. There’s only so many times you can give away Balloon Fight before it stops being the carrot on a stick.

Nintendo does at least seem serious about getting online right this time. At least if how long they’ve been working on it is any indication. Paid online was initially supposed to roll out in Fall 2017, but that ultimately got pushed back a year. The company has done a fairly poor job communicating to their customers in regards to the reasons behind this. To this day, we don’t have a firm time frame on release.

Everything will likely get cleared up in the upcoming Direct. Though so far Nintendo has failed to really bring anything compelling to the table. Even free alternatives like Steam offer a far superior experience, with robust social and matchmaking features that allow you to easily find people to play with. Friend codes should not be a thing in 2018. Nor should you have to use an external app to chat to people. 

As is, the Switch’s online feels firmly stuck in 2006. While $20 for the year isn’t a lot, it’s still going to have to improve drastically before it becomes worth the money.