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

  • THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    I remember this article from, oh, it says it right there, April 2025. Turns out no one who owns the things actually cares. And if you do, you pay for NSO.

    • mursejoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      Yes another Nintendo hit piece that nobody who actually plays NS2 gives a shit about.

      If I’m playing with friends, I’m in discord on PC and console.

      If I’m playing NS2 it’s almost always alone.

      A I’m playing NS2 with friends, it’s on the couch at their house.

  • DupaCycki@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    Leave it to Shitendo to include a dedicated button that does nothing but advertise a subscription for a service that is completely free on PC. Free on a Switch too, if you mod it first.

    Don’t worry, though, homebrew software will allow you to rebind it to something else. Just wait for that, and don’t use Nintendo’s consoles unmodded. Stock firmware is a mostly unusable piece of shit.

    It’s been 10 years since the original Switch launched, and the only themes you get are… light and dark. Or you can have thousands of themes if you jailbreak the console. And save managers. And cheats if you want to skip the grind in some games. Better performance on Switch OLED and Lite. Emulation of older systems. And the list goes on and on.

    There’s so much these consoles are capable of, that Nintendo desperately wants to block or charge you insane prices for. Mostly just block.

  • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    Realistically, this is also true of the Dualsense on PS5. It has a clear, dedicated LED button to disable the microphone, and that mic is rarely used for anything but online chat.

  • LettyWhiterock@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    The switch 2 has a button dedicated to a specific feature that requires payment. Valid to criticize, but also I can’t imagine actually caring that much.

  • squaresinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    I don’t own a switch, nor do I care for Nintendo.

    But why are we posting news that’s older than a year? Got nothing new?

  • OhStopYellingAtMe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    I don’t have a Switch 2 and am not interested in getting one, but I do know rage-bait articles about non-issues. I can’t understand someone throwing a tantrum because there’s a button on their controller that they don’t need. Just ignore it?

    Hey, I bought a car that has a “Bluelink+” option to talk to their support people. It’s a subscription service which I don’t pay for. It doesn’t harm me in the least that the button is there and I don’t use it. I don’t even mind that the ads for the car mention that it’s a feature. It would be weird if it did upset me.

    • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      The rational thing to do is to allow binding that key to some other function, but that wouldn’t be miserable for the users so they won’t allow that

    • stylusmobilus@aussie.zoneEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

      It was clear before the release of the console that gamechat was part of NSO.

      People bitched, but in the end most of us have the thing anyway. Personally, I don’t use it at all but I did get the camera now it’s dirt cheap because it has other functions

      It’s a nothing burger but I guess I can see a larger point that may grow into a real concern at some stage.

    • Infrapink@thebrainbin.org
      0·
      9 days ago

      Get out of here with your facts and rational thought, if Nintendo does something it’s automatically uniquely bad.

      • 4am@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        Especially because video games are theMOST IMPORTANT METRIC of a FUNCTIONAL SOCIETY

  • SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org
    0·
    9 days ago

    Lots of Nintendo suckers in here, huh. As for me, I vowed to never buy anything from them anymore, after they tried to basically patent summoning in games.

  • Etterra@discuss.onlineEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    I’d wonder if team speak still exists, but I never play multiplayer games anyway, so it’s a moot point. Also I can’t afford a Switch because I’m an American.

  • whereitsat@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    nintendo used to mean games like castlevania, metroid, earthbound, final fantasy, shadowrun, goldeneye. now it means ‘games for little kids featuring goofy characters with too-big heads.’

    you shouldn’t have this system to begin with.

    we’re all adults, right?

  • wowbaggerip@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 days 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
      0·
      9 days 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.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      0·
      9 days ago

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

      • donk@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        9 days ago

        Steam is not open. It is literally DRM that locks down an open platform.

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
          0·
          9 days ago

          It’s very light DRM and it doesn’t lock the majority of game files nor the save files. You can freely back up the save files and it’s very easy to pirate the games. What stops people from doing that is because it’s much more convenient to have Steam manage them. Valve has always been all about convenience not the DRM.

          • donk@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            8 days ago

            That’s what Valve says, yes, but those are the virtues of PC, an open platform, not Steam - which is just a storefront and license provisioning service. PC games have portable game files by default, Steam implements one way to manage them. It is worth making the distinction, especially in a thread where the discussion is about what owning hardware means in a service-driven world.

    • mlem@startrek.websiteEnglish
      0·
      9 days 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

    • DupaCycki@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      And then you realize the only reliable way to back up your saves is to… jailbreak the console and use homebrew save managers. Which Nintendo is doing everything in its power to stop from happening.

      Personally I quite like my modded Switch OLED. But I genuinely can’t see how anyone would use this console unmodded.