Nintendo Switch Online surpasses 10 million accounts

First, you should understand that I’m not speaking out of personal desire. I would love a more robust Nintendo online.

“Are you saying that because there’s 10 million people paying for it without complaining? So Nintendo should keep their service shitty because they don’t hear enough people from those 10 million complain about it on the internet?”

The product is successful and extremely profitable. As a general rule, that’s not something you dump more money into unless you have a specific compelling reason to do so. How many of the people complaining on the internet about Nintendo Online are PS4 or PC fans who are unlikely to buy a Switch Online account anyway? Do you know? I doubt Nintendo does either. So the choice is either A) Dump millions of dollars into a product which is *already* profitable to chase customers who may or may not exist, or B) Enjoy lots and lots of money. Not a hard decision for a business.

“After all, companies shouldn’t even bother caring about customer satisfaction before they get into a internet shitstorm, right?”

The question assumes facts not in evidence. First, you need to show that there’s a significant issue of customer satisfaction that they are neglecting. That they made a product that isn’t for you is not a customer satisfaction issue. What percentage of online account holders are significantly dissatisfied, and how dissatisfied are they? Is that lack of satisfaction significant enough to effect future purchasing decisions? Do you know any of this, or are you just pretending to know this based on gaming site comment sections even though 99.999% of Nintendo’s customers do not comment of game site message boards?

This is a bitter pill to swallow for most hardcore gaming enthusiasts, but it has to be said. *We are not their primary customer.* What we want is secondary to the health and success of Nintendo as a business. Now I don’t like that. I would love a company that thrived on “hardcores first”, but rarely does reality give us a perfect scenario.

“People don’t pay for it because they like it, they pay for it because they have to.”

Citation needed. How would you even collect that data?

“Besides, shouldn’t every company always strive to satisfy their customers and to improve?? Seems like absolute common sense to me.”

That’s actually an unbelievably terrible idea that would completely destroy most businesses. You need to care about quality, but quality costs money. You can only care about quality up to the point that your customers are actually willing to pay. McDonald’s could create an absolutely phenominal and amazing $40 burger, but who’s going to buy it? You invest in your product up to the point where you maximize return, not to create some hypothetically idealized product that caters to the 3 people in the world who actually care. So the question is, would the money they spend improving Nintendo Switch online be more or less than the new customers the improvements would generate? Nintendo has that market research. We don’t.

“I don’t even know what your comment is supposed to tell me and what its purpose is. I genuinenly don’t get it.”
The long and the short of it is, if the problems with the online service doesn’t *actually* cost them customers, there isn’t *actually* a customer satisfaction problem. This isn’t a loot box based system where EA can keep charging the same customer over and over again to stay viable. They needed to draw a fairly large audience, and they did. That’s proof of business concept right there.

“Generally, online multiplayer does not require people to pay for it, as we can see on PC, ”

Not anymore. Not on console. Not since the Xbox360 defined how the west saw online play on consoles. Sure, it’s a terrible deal for everyone involved. Yes, first it was just Xbox, then it infected Sony, now it’s infected Nintendo. Value though, is 100$ in the eyes of the buyer. If people place value on the simple act of getting to connect online on a console, then people are going to charge for it.

Nintendo is not just at an abstract and ethical responsibility to do their best to turn a profit for their owners, but a literal legal obligation to do so. If the general public are dumb enough to think that it’s reasonable to pay for access to peet-to-peer hosting, there is an actual legal argument that a gaming company is in violation of their obligations if they *don’t* charge for it and leave money on the table for no reason.

The good news is this probably won’t last forever. Boomers and Gen Xers will fade away into age, and younger people will never think that paying for general access is justifiable.

” It made perfect sense in my head, because as you’ve said, quality requires money, and a paid service was gonna give them that money. But turns out they had no such plans, lol.”

I think many of us fans might have to come to terms with the concept that….. it is entirely possible that Nintendo are not competent to make things better.

” You need to make investments for a chance to generate even more profit, don’t you? It works for the competition too, so why can’t Nintendo do it?”

You’re mixing up “can” with “should”. If they can make the profit without the improvements, and it doesn’t actually hurt their public image enough to damage sales, why spend their energy there? As for raising the price for a better service, this is a guess, but I’m going to guess that the people who’s most successful console is the Wii are probably marketing to a poorer demographic. Back to the McDonald’s example with a twist. Which would you rather own? McDonald’s who sells lots and lots of cheap food, or a Michelin Star restaurant? If you want glamour, obviously the latter. If you want to make lots and lots of money, you do the former. By and large, cheap outsellf top quality every single time. This is why Nintendo doesn’t compete for most powerful console. Back in the day, the NES was absolutely pathetic compared to computers. The PS2 was the weakest of its generation (if you don’t count the Dreamcast) and it crushed the world. The Wii was more or less a modified Gamecube and it humiliated the competition not simply in sales, but in profit per sale as well. While the PS3 and Xbox 360 were selling low numbers of consoles at a loss, Nintendo was selling high numbers of Wiis at a profit. This is what they’re shooting for. The price point that hits mass appeal, outside just the typical gaming audience. Once they start raising prices to appeal to just the typical gaming audience, you lose half the reason Nintendo machines sell in the first place.

” Which is why we don’t know if people are actually satisfied with it. This is why I think it’s a bit ridiculous to think that Nintendo shouldn’t even bother with improving the service- just because they don’t see millions complaining about it online, doesn’t mean dissatisfied consumers don’t exist.”

It’s certainly more indicative of that then it is of there being widespread dissatisfaction without any evidence. Put your place in a Nintendo exec’s shoes. You walk into the board room and you have a proposal to spend tens of millions in online infrastructure. They ask you why they should do that when it’s already a successful program. You tell them for customer satisfaction. Do you think they aren’t going to ask you why you think customers are significantly dissatisfied? Companies do not drop millions of dollars and change their entire pricing model on a blind idea that there simply must be someone out there somewhere who would prefer things this way.

” I genuinenly can’t see a single reason why anyone would actually want to pay for it, other than the simple fact of wanting to play online, which in itself doesn’t require them to ask for a fee, as we’ve established already. ”

You could say precisely the same thing about gaming hardware. In fact, legendary former Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi did just that. (paraphrased from memory) “The system is just a box that people have to buy to get to Mario.” As I said earlier, our problem is that people *DO* see value in just getting access to online. Value is a measure determined by the buyer. If people *will* pay for online, then online inherently *has* value. It’s precisely the same reason an Apple product costs three times as much as another brand’s of the same specifications. People will pay it, therefore it is worth that much. I fall into this category myself. I wish Switch online were better. I do not wish it were better enough to stop paying for it. This is how, in the absence of unusual necessity like selling water in the desert, fair prices are determined.

“In all honesty, the way I see it, this whole thing just makes Nintendo look like a bunch of greedy fucks that came up with a way of pulling money out of people’s pockets without having to give anything back in return. ”

What it actually showcases, is that you don’t understand at the most basic and foundational level, what value is and how it is fairly evaluated. The one greedy in this situation here is you, demanding that Nintendo spend millions and completely throw away a successful program just because it isn’t the kind of program you would prefer. The Switch is the budget console. They market to budget customers, as they have for nearly 20 years. Their web program last gen was budget, as was the gen before that. They are not the platform for the tech enthusiasts. They have gone *way* out of their way to tell you that again, and again, and again, and again, and again. By what rational standard can you expect them to suddenly start building, pricing, and marketing to a tech enthusiast’s standard in the middle of their already existing budget oriented platform?