Nintendo hasn’t provided firm numbers for their Nintendo Switch Online subscription service, but it seems to be growing well. However, Nintendo is concerned that new players seem to be opting for shorter subscriptions rather than purchasing the 12 month subscription. The firm says that they need to find ways to enrich the value of the service so that those who have signed on for three months continue with their subscription.
“It is critical that these members want to continue using the service for a long time rather than letting it expire, and for that we need to build relationships with consumers and enrich the content”
“With this in mind, we are currently planning ways to boost the appeal of the service on a yearly basis… It is very important to our future business and we are giving it our all.”
Shuntaro Furukawa
virtual console… thats all
and when… a real online experience with chat and voice over switch… not cellphone.
I don’t see the need for a virtual console. This will eventually grow into a library of NES, SNES, and potentially N64 titles. Maybe even GameCube. I don’t want to buy these games over and over on each new console Nintendo puts out. I rather have it this way. Also, being able to play any of these games online is really fun.
I rather they just make more mini-consoles or game compilation packs like Sega, Atari and SNK has on the Switch.
no if you once buy them, you should can use them so long as a nintendo consoles comes out. not buying it for every new console.
on the wii i hade 17 nes games, 25 snes games and a few mega drive games.
i would like to play them on the switch.
do you know how long it takes for the switch to get new games… every 3 month 2 games… in a year maybe 10 games… afte 5 years you have 50 games and from them there are a hand full games that you realy wanted.
Frentz how can you sit there and say that there are only 2 new games every 3 months? The switch averages 25-30 games a week right (just through the E-shop), in total (physical and downloadable) the switch has over 1,500 games in just under 2 years. I would say that is a great fan base. 8+ million subscribers in the USA alone for the ONLINE service. So where do you get your numbers? If you don’t like the switch, sell, and stop being a jack ass hater. go play yet another halo or medal of honor on PS4 and Xbox. the switch is one of the best systems out right now. Graphic wise it may lack but over all it is so much fun to play and use. a much much wider, diverse game library than sony or xbox. and you complain about buying games over and over but you have no problem with sony and xbox, grabbing your cash for the same crap over and over.
@kaicee
ho many nes games are in the switch?
how long is the service online?
at the start they put games on it… then 3 new ones last month 2 new ones.
still the nes mini has more games ;-)
read the text correct… i dident speak from indie and other download games…
its only the nintendo switch online.
i dont play halo and other things you said
holy shit you need to learn to speak english before you tell people to read your text “correctly”
But there are classic titles I want to play on the go that only Switch is capable of right now. It actually depends on what a certain gaming system can offer. I see that Switch is really portable; thus, you can bring it with you and play the games you want and that’s available.
you can start by removing friend codes. Something you promised us in 2017.
The friend codes are irrelevant, it’s not like the Wii when you had to input the code. Pick the right criticisms.
but I do have to input friend codes????
I have a feeling this might cue SNES games then Gamecube games. I wonder how much longer we be also waiting for a Nintendo Direct?
Rumors say February 13th
February 13th
Cancel this bull**** and release a Virtual Console, or just release SNES, N64 and GCN games for this “online” thing
Yes! Get rid of the rental purchases app, and let us buy the games! VC would be brilliant on Switch and actually would make them money on Switch. If the games are priced reasonably then they would make so much money from it. They are the last company, weirdly, to not offer their classic games that are available to purchase.
I prefer a rental system. I just wished it had a larger catalog. If it had all the NES, SNES, N64, and Game Cube games on it at once, it would be SO worth it.
Yes! Get rid of the rental purchases app, and let us buy the games! VC would be brilliant on Switch and actually would make them money on Switch. If the games are priced reasonably then they would make so much money from it. They are the last company, weirdly, to not offer their classic games that are available to purchase.
You could start by adding more than two classic games a month…
Im honestly baffled that they didnt expect this. no one pays for yearly subscriptions without an actual benefit. we’ve already had free online for a year. its no wonder people opt for short plans. no ones going to buy a year when thre are no incentives, even if it’s cheap. they need to do more than these silly NES/SNES games that they’ve re-released repeatedly. I dont care about those games anymore, and im sure other people bought nes/snes classics for their fix.
honestly.. All you need to do is revamp the profile features. Add a messaging system, add an invite system allow custom themes.grant subscribers to special demos and DLC. idk if it’s possible but if thy could add voicechat features like fortnight and minecraft have where you can chat by plugging a headset to the switch without the stupid phone app.add virtual console games that should be considered virtual console these days. nintendo 64 and gamecube games should be there. im not even asking for much with that. just load the game and add pro controller support. add more options to video sharing than just facebook and twitter. how about youtube and twitch? that’s it.
Good to hear.
Start by realizing that 2-3 NES games a month are not exciting in any way?
Maybe give us 3 SNES games a month.. and dump “30 more” NES games at once.
That should improve it a lot more!
Maybe fix the online so that I can play ultimate without lagging, do away with the friend codes, and give us more than 2 games that are as old as dirt per month. Oh and get rid of the useless app.
I’ll probably purchase when I can get SNES games. I honestly don’t feel a huge need for online play when I do play. I’ll probably end up purchasing the yearly subscription when I really need cloud saves and when I’ll actually get something for it. And SNES games were way better than NES games.
hows about voice chat so i can play payday 2 with all my friends with out having to use other damn apps also i feel the whole UI needs to be refreshed so we can message people i feel the wiiU was way more social than the switch
They’ve been saying that for a while. Personally for me, when a new NES game or 2 is added to the library, I just go, “Oh.”. It doesn’t excite me at all. Even if they added SNES games(which its confirmed they will), I don’t think it’d really be my jam. N64 games would be pretty great though!
I’m really only excited about the potential that thing can have if they put some extra effort into it. We can get a huge collection that would be easily transferred to future gen consoles if it being part of the online service means they won’t need to start over by readding the games to future eshops, but at the rate they’re going the library will take years or even decades to become impressive. :/
Personally, I say the free games is an issue that will fix itself. Think about it; In about 3 years from now, people that subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online will likely have over 100 games to pick from, right now it’s an issue but overtime it will fix itself especially if they decide to bring in Nintendo 64, Nintendo Gamecube, and Nintendo Wii titles.
As for *actual* problems, well first you can fix the stupid requirements for the voice chat, there is absolutely no reason to need a mobile phone to voice chat, if you want to make it an option for people that don’t happen to have a decent microphone then yeah that’s fine but don’t make it mandatory. And yes, before anyone says it, I know the Nintendo Switch does have a microphone but it’s apparently even worse than the Nintendo Wii U’s Microphone which was already rubbish.
Secondly, stop with the nonsense of only letting us play modes in Splatoon when you want us to, we paid for Nintendo Switch online and should be able to play online modes when we want, not when you say we can. And while you’re at it, get rid of that stupid stage rotation, do what Mario Kart does and let people vote for what stage the next game will take place on and if you’re weapon just happens to be unfavourable for said stage, just change weapons like we can already do!
I think that’s all the criticism I have, only other thing I can think of is if Nintendo releases DLC for a specific game, for a limited time Nintendo Switch Online customers can get said DLC at a reduced price.
The fact the Splatoon games have eliminated most player choice is the main reason I haven’t bothered in even renting the game, much less buy it.
Err… Bring back MiiVerse! Only accessible to subscribers…
VC is not so important to me at this point.
Add chat and scrap the phone app
:D
Oh boy, as soon as I read the article, I was like “here come the NES Online complaints.”
I was right.
If I may put in my two cents: the service I’d like to see is one NES game, one SNES game, one N64 game and one GBA game per month.
If they were giving 1 NES, 1 SNES, 1 N64, & 1 GBA game away per month that you’d like to see, the complaints over the NES app wouldn’t be as big as it is, but since the only games they are getting right now IS just NES games, of course people are complaining about it.
How about they actually justify the fact of charging people money for online multiplayer? Next to nothing has changed about the online multiplayer experience since the Wii. It’s still laggy, online features are extremely limited and very anti-consumer, we STILL have to use friendcodes in the year 2019, there’s no messaging system, no built in voice chat, no direct invitations, no personal profiles/customization/personalization. Right now, they’re charging money for letting us use peer-to-peer connections, which means, we have to pay money to allow people to connect to *our* network, we’re not even playing on their servers or anything. It seriously blows my mind that people seem to be ok with this. You’d think they’d be able to put out some real good stuff from the get-go, seeing how they had more than 10 goddamn years to watch the competition and observe what consumers like and what they don’t like. But instead, they just launched a total shitshow of an online subscription service.
Anything online related is absolute garbage on Nintendo consoles, it’s pathetic.
Nintendo, if you can make it work better, do that, but you should’ve kept the VC, no one said anything like “gee that virtual console is a bad idea, players paying for the games they want and being able to play them anytime they want because they own the software, is bad, lets change it” the virtual console, despite taking time between new releases on it (but really this pathetic 2 games a month is way worse than how long we waited for new VC games) was a good system and out of everything you should’ve kept from the Wii U era, it was the VC
I’ve been much less into gaming without Miiverse. Just not the same without the social aspect and sharing my experiences with others.
It’s really not that hard to understand why people don’t want long term subscriptions to a service with no real benefits. I may not be speaking for everyone, but when I say this, but NES, SNES, N64 games are not benefits. Hearing that I’ll get to play Super Metroid for 20th time, except online doesn’t excite me in the least. All they have to do is give voice chat, custom messaging, exclusives deals and demo’s to subscribers, and I’d actually buy it. I just don’t get why this is so difficult a problem for them to fathom..
The ONLY reason I got their paid online service is for those cloud saves. If there was an alternative to keeping my saves safe, I wouldn’t have bought the service this year & would have waited next year to get it instead… provided they improved the service by that point. While 8m out of 20-something million is a lot, Nintendo clearly isn’t happy with that number of subscribers since they are talking about improving the service. And now it turns out some, if not most, of the subscribers only got the 3 or 6 month subscriptions. *laughs* 3 to 6 months sounds about right for some people to lose interest in the online games they are currently playing (including Smash Ultimate.) They could renew the subscription, sure, but that’s provided they intend on buying whatever new online game that comes out by the time their sub is about to expire. And not everyone is into Smash, Mario Kart, Diablo, Doom, online NES games, etc.
Bleh. I should clarify that 3-6 months sounds about right for the average gamer to lose interest. A hardcore gamer/fan of the game could spend YEARS playing the same online game.
After all, people STILL play Melee to this day & that came out in the early 2000s if I remember correctly!
This Shuntaro guy always sounds like he’s all about work and no play at all. “We need to do this in order to raise this in the long run and blah blah” I don’t know how to put it but it doesn’t sound like he’s speaking to us the players unlike his previous predecessors did when commented on something.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. Shuntaro Furukawa is the ONLY Nintendo president young enough to have grown up a player with Nintendo, he even plays current games. Kimishima didn’t play, Iwata was certainly a player (and developer) but players criticized him saying he was out of touch with modern gaming, and the Yamauchi family weren’t interested in playing video games other than Mahjong, they just went with the trends (which was smart business). There haven’t been many presidents of Nintendo, you think they just handed this job out to anyone?
Furukawa is the real deal and I guarantee if it was someone else who cared more about the bottom line than the players we would have a garbage Metroid Prime game released this year as opposed to telling the players they screwed up and are working hard to deliver us a higher quality game.
Start with a proper voice chat function.
For me it’s just the quality of the online services and interactions. The poor voice chat goes without saying, but matchmaking, friend invites, inability to send game invites, and just overall the lack of any integration or options makes the system feel very tacked on at best. It’s still not even close to the quality of playing with friends on the 360, and I don’t even like the Xbox, Nintendo’s online systems need to catch up well over 10 years. At least it’s cheap, sure, but still… That only goes so far
1) work with Microsoft and use azure to improve the quality of online gameplay and streaming
2) bring 10 games a month, from nes, snes, gameboy, GBA, GBC, n64.
3) introduce “online Plus” that also comes out with gamecube, DS, and Wii. And additional features, like more online save space or something.
3) additional online apps/services like a browser, maybe animation,
4) add support for wireless headphones and not use the app
5) free indie games (come on Xbox gives away 4 games a month.
I hope that Xbox brings game pass to switch. They are bringing it to android and ios…
The third-party licensing is probably the most time consuming part but even if they offered all first-party NES, SNES, N64 games, I’d easily pay a higher monthly fee (i.e. Netflix). Don’t waste time making modifications, no “special versions”, just dump the original games! I mean, how hard can it be?
-Give us eShop discounts.
-Increase the rate of NES games, along with SNES, N64, GCN titles.
-Allow cloud saves for all games (especially Splatoon 2 and Pokémon).
-Give players the option to voice chat directly through the console.
Do these things, and this will be a good service for the price.
Switch online membership is broken. Nintendo its time to fix it, we want
1 Proper voice chat, that phone app is rubbish
2 Text messaging
3 Dedicated servers
4 Scrap friend codes, it’s 2019
5 N64 & Game cube games
6 Discounts from the eShop for online members
7 Make some sort of social space where we could meet up with friends and share experiences
you should be happy you have dumbasses signing up to this crap. I dont even pay for ps4 online and pc has it free. be thankful you have shhep to take advantage of.
sheep*
I only want it for the cloud saves. Sadly, Splatoon 2 is the only thing I can’t save which still annoys me.
You want to boost the Switch’s appeal?
1. Dedicated servers. This one area you SEVERELY lack in. Make it for Splatoon 2 and other online games, not just a select one or two games.
2. Cloud saves. This is also needed for Splatoon 2. You have no excuse to not add it, but don’t obviously add the ranks for ranked mode to it.
3. IP blacklist/ban. All these tryhard, edgy, aimbot-using, cheating, hacking kiddies are ruining Splatoon 2. Ban their IP, blacklist them from ever playing online ever again on ANY games that are online and HEAVILY restrict the eShop for them.
I subscribed for the year because $20 isn’t a big ask, but I haven’t been totally happy with the service.
First, voicechat needs to just work without a lot of extra headaches. I own the official Zelda headset and my friend owns the official Splatoon one. After 20 minutes of me remotely walking him through how to set it all up, he could hear me, but I couldn’t hear him. We gave up and called each other and put it on speaker phone. That’s not the kind of service you pay for.
The loss of virtual console hits a big fan like me hard. I’ve sunk hundreds of dollars into the virtual console, so it would be cool if their Netflix-style NES games could exist, but be supplemented by games you own that aren’t yet available on the service (even if this means that those games do not have online support like the others). At this point, I’ve mostly migrated over to Retropie for my retro gaming (primarily because of the way that Nintendo handled the NES Classic Edition and this), but I’d still like to be able to use the official service for online play. I’m anxiously awaiting the day they add other consoles and I can play Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64 online, but it seems like the drip of 2 or 3 games per month (with those lame SP versions thrown in to make me feel like I’m getting something more than I am) is just going to take forever. Also, I hate that I can only play my friends in the games. I have like five friends on the Switch, two that I would feel really comfortable texting to ask if they want to jump into a game with me and zero that will want to play NES Dr. Mario. Can’t we open it up to be able to play with strangers too? It’s not like the voice chat really works, they can’t harass me.
Speaking of games, I realize they don’t have enough games to offer free games in the way that Sony and Microsoft do (and that the service is priced accordingly), but for a lot of younger fans, Tecmo Bowl means nothing to them. Even a lot of older fans don’t really care about the nostalgia roms, so what would make you think that younger generations would care at all?
The friend code thing is so lame. If I’m already friends with someone on Facebook, I don’t need it, but Facebook is pretty lame too. Couldn’t they add Instagram? Or just let me type in the person’s Nintendo handle?
I liked the idea of the exclusive member buys. For example (the only example?), how you needed to be a member in order to buy the NES controllers. Since they were easy to get, I’m assuming that helped fend off scalpers. Maybe they could have more like that?
nintendo shuld just let xbox live gold come to the swich