Nintendo has announced its paid membership Nintendo Switch Online service will be launching in September 2018. Once it arrives, Switch players will have to stump up cold, hard cash every year if they want to play online multiplayer Switch games such as Splatoon 2 and Mario Kart 8.
The Switch online service will be cheaper than the competition, coming in at $19.99 for the year or $3.99 per month. Subscribers will get access to online play, a rotating catalog of classic games and hopefully some undisclosed improvements to the system level features afforded to players.
Nintendo Switch Online
For some reason, large swathes of people are actually genuinely excited for this news. I’ve been happy with it being free, personally, and Nintendo needs to implement some major changes if it wants to a push a service that it’s worth paying an annual subscription for.
Nintendo Switch Online Hype
While Xbox Live and PlayStation Plus are expensive, subscribers are at least guaranteed a minimum of 48 games to play a year, some of which are even fairly new AAA releases. Nintendo Switch’s online service will be half the price, but it also seems like it’ll have less than half the feature set, barring any massive surprises. While PS+ users have recently got MGSV, Rime, and Just Cause 3, Nintendo is touting Dr. Mario, Balloon Fight and Super Mario Bros 3. Collectively those three games are over 90 years old.
Right now on the Switch you have to use a separate mobile phone app to chat with friends, there is no OS-wide party system, nor cloud saves, and friends still have to be added via friends codes. Some would call it quaint, I’d probably call it antiquated.
If Nintendo wants to start charging for this they’re going to need to offer some genuine improvements, as well as launching it alongside a multiplayer game that will genuinely encourage fans to subscribe. Smash Bros seems like the easy option, or there’s the potential for online Pokemon shenanigans.
Does the addition of paid online cause you to think twice about a Switch purchase? Is it a service worth paying for? Let us know what you think!
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