A bright future for Nintendo Switch Online

The Nintendo Switch Online service is one of the biggest criticisms of the Switch so far, as it is truly a terrible, anti-consumer practice. I can’t think of a single person who is excited to pay for online, when it is worse than when it was free. Maybe they are happy about the NES games or cloud saves, but no one in their right mind would take this as better than without paying. Reflecting back, I’ve come to realise that Nintendo has often made mistakes when trying out new practices, but they have usually worked to make it better. I truly do see a bright future for the online service, so let’s have a look at how I think it will evolve in the future.

Classic Games

This is the area where I believe Nintendo can make the most ground if they want to entice more people in the future. Their current setup is not great to say the least. There are 24 NES games and, while a lot of good ones are there, many classics such as Metroid are missing. Furthermore, a lot of the games are not very appealing, such as Tennis and Soccer. If this is supposed to be our reward for paying $20 each year, which would surely be better spend on a new indie game, it isn’t very rewarding.

The best solution here is to expand range of games that the service offers. From NES to N64 and from GB to DS. I do not believe we need GameCube to be included as the games are worth more than a $20 annual subscription. Instead, they should be sold sell them separately. In fact, they should sell every game on the service separately because it is easier for some s to just buy the individual games. It is better to have a choice with how you want to play classic games.

Another solution would be a “Nintendo Switch Online Plus” service. It would cost more money, but it would feature a much broader range of classic games, including GameCube. Obviously people would complain about the price, but if they could bring most great games from NES to Wii and GB to 3DS, it would definitely be worth it. People would definitely be a lot more likely to consider buying a Switch and buying the service if it had such great rewards. I know I would find great enjoyment from playing from a huge range of Nintendo classics, even if it cost twice as much!

Special Offers

It is still a mystery to us what the “Special Offers” to come with the service are, which means that we have the ability to speculate anything we like about them. It seems logical that they might do something like “$5 off an Eshop purchase” which you get every few months, but you cannot stack them. This means, that if I wanted to buy a $20, I couldn’t just wait to get four of these vouchers. The most I could get discounted off one purchase is just $5.

I believe that this is the most realistic model that they would use. They probably make over $5 profit on most game sales, which means that they would still make a profit if they followed through with this. However, they would not make a profit if the game was 100% off. While it would be annoying to not be able to stack the special offers, it is what is realistic. However, we can still hope that Nintendo allows us to stack our vouchers so that, after a few months of saving up, we can make a purchase without spending any money other than the subscription fee. Furthermore, Nintendo Switch Online Plus s would receive more benefits than s on the standard subscription.

Online Play

The service has somehow managed to make online play worse, even though it costs money now. Even in popular games like Splatoon 2, I face longer waiting times after people refused to buy the service and therefore could not play Splatoon 2. Now imagine how difficult it would be to get a match in a less popular game NBA 2K19. Nintendo has really let us down with their anti-consumer practice and failure to plan for a situation where people don’t buy the service. It is utterly disappointing that this is being forced upon us, but there is a solution: dedicated servers.

Currently, the Switch uses “player to player” technology to communicate with the other Switches you are connected to. This means that every multiplayer activity is hosted on one Switch and the connection of the game depends on that ’s internet quality. It also means that it is difficult to communicate with other systems around the world. If they would use dedicated servers, everything would travel at a high speed and the connection would be stable. If this happens, we won’t have nearly as many disconnections and Obby won’t have to swear to F*CC that he’ll kill a man if it disconnects.

Voice Chat

I don’t have many friends with Switches, which is one of the reasons that I stay active on Nintendo Switch Amino. Therefore, I haven’t ever had the opportunity to test out the voice chat. However, I know that the way it works isn’t great. While I have my doubts, I do believe that Nintendo will be able to move voice chat over to the system from the phone and allow the Switch to bluetooth headphones. Currently, I have to use a huge wire which goes from my Switch in its dock to my headphones. It is inconvenient to say the least. There is a good chance that Nintendo will move away from smartphone-only voice chat to system-based voice chat and allow s to use bluetooth headphones.

As you can tell, I am very optimistic about Nintendo Switch Online. Leave your thoughts in the comments. As always, thanks for reading!