We got a glimpse of some new information about Nintendo's Switch Online Service yesterday during the Direct, but most of what was shown there was already known. To help shed a little more light on just what a subscription entails, Nintendo put a FAQ up on their site. The details are as follows:

• As already stated before the Direct, all Switch users (used to be only launch users) can get a 7 day free trial. This gives you access to online, voice chat, cloud saves, and the NES games.
• Those two wireless NES controllers are only purchasable if you have a current paid Nintendo Switch Online sub.
• The full list of 20 playable NES games for subscribers was revealed: Soccer, Tennis, Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 1 and 3, Balloon Fight, Ice Climber, Dr. Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Double Dragon, River City Ransom, Ghost's N Goblins, Tecmo Bowl, Gradius, Pro Wrestling, Excitebike, Yoshi, Ice Hockey, and Baseball.
• Each month, a new set of games will be added to the group.
• October will add NES Open Golf, Solomon's Key, and Super Dodge Ball
• November additions are Mighty Bomb Jack, Twinbee, and Metroid.
• December brings Wario's Woods, Adventures of Lolo, and Ninja Gaiden.
• Additionally, if you ever lapse in your subscription, you will lose all cloud data. "Save data stored with Save Data Cloud cannot be kept outside of the duration of your Nintendo Switch Online membership." If you cancel or let it expire, you'll lose all data saved on the cloud.
• If you play the NES games, you need to check in every 7 days by going online to verify your account.

Source: Nintendo UK
Source: Nintendo of America

 

[|<roni&g]

Many anti consumer morons on this forum argued against me when I told them the switch paid online is a disgrace and we shouldn't be paying for Nintendo online. We never have had to pay until now and look at the state of it.
People said things like "ok so tell us how you feel about ms and Sony" which is a completely different ball game.
Idiots, stupid idiots willing to bleed money on nothing. Behind the times tendo

 

[Kafkaus00]

“It’s only 20$ so who cares... if you can’t afford 20$ a year it’s your fault”.

Do you understand that even if I can I might not want to do it just because it’s shit. It’s basically 20$ to backup saves and if you stop you lose everything.

 

[pivix]

It's hillarious to see that the Wii U had
-Virtual Console complete with games up to N64 minus Gameboy and GBC
-Miiverse, included a way to communicate with your friendslist
-An internet browser
-Apps like Netflix and YouTube
-An eShop that seemed to have care put into it including optional music
-Probably more I can't think of

Yet the Switch doesn't have any of those things and Nintendo wants payment for this service. How do you as a company take a step this far bloody back?

Nobody liked Wii U xP. Now it is a time to praise it xD

 

[TimeMaster]

Yeah cuz they totally can't afford that temporary server space.

 

[LWGShane]

And instead of forcing you to buy all these games for 5 to 20 dollars Each,

Except they already did that. On Wii U and 3DS. Bought them on Wii? Too bad, you have to rebuy them on Wii U and 3DS. I wouldn't mind buying them outright on Switch. It's a perfect Virtual Console device. However, now we have to rent them and check-in every seven days. Imagine if Microsoft or Sony did that. Oh wait Microsoft tried to do that and Nintendo fanboys bashed the crap out of MS. If only they would do that with Nintendo instead of bending over.

Your saves will save on your switch. What is the problem here?

You can't back them up. You have to pay Nintendo $20/year and hope that your games are compatible with cloud saves. What's beyond hypocritical is that you can backup your saves on Nintendo's own 3DS and Wii.

 

[Nic:3]

Normally, I don’t post here, nor use a big bold letter, but since many people seem to think this cloud save is a hostage situation,
You only lose your backup save file on the cloud if you cancel you subscription, not the save on your switch itself!!!
The wording seems misleading, but I believe that they meant to say what I said in bold.

The reason I believe so is that
1. The site does not state that you need your internet to use your save file. It only states that you only need internet for backing up and sharing your save with other consoles. How else will you play offline then?
2. Some games don’t support it. If they are gonna take hostages like everyone said, wouldn’t it be better to support every games instead?
3. They know law and have lawyers. Deleting saves from users’ console itself is same as sending malwares to delete files from computers. They wouldn’t want users around the world to sue them.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like this pay for online too, since most games are P2P. However, I feel that many people are bashing nintendo for the wrong thing. So, unless your subscription expires and you are so unlucky that your switch breaks on the same day, I wouldn’t worry about the savefiles. We should worry more about online gameplay quality.

Correct me if I’m wrong.

 

[Kafkaus00]

Normally, I don’t post here, nor use a big bold letter, but since many people seem to think this cloud save is a hostage situation,
You only lose your backup save file on the cloud if you cancel you subscription, not the save on your switch itself!!!
The wording seems misleading, but I believe that they meant to say what I said in bold.

The reason I believe so is that
1. The site does not state that you need your internet to use your save file. It only states that you only need internet for backing up and sharing your save with other consoles. How else will you play offline then?
2. Some games don’t support it. If they are gonna take hostages like everyone said, wouldn’t it be better to support every games instead?
3. They know law and have lawyers. Deleting saves from users’ console itself is same as sending malwares to delete files from computers. They wouldn’t want users around the world to sue them.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like this pay for online too, since most games are P2P. However, I feel that many people are bashing nintendo for the wrong thing. So, unless your subscription expires and you are so unlucky that your switch breaks on the same day, I wouldn’t worry about the savefiles. We should worry more about online gameplay quality.

Correct me if I’m wrong.

Ofc you don’t lose the saves on the switch itself how horrible that would be... I don’t even think they could do something like that, but that doesn’t change the fact that if you can’t pay for another year or month and you break your switch your saves are gone...

 

[TimeMaster]

Ofc you don’t lose the saves on the switch itself how horrible that would be... I don’t even think they could do something like that, but that doesn’t change the fact that if you can’t pay for another year or month and you break your switch your saves are gone...

I think this is an obvious fact also, who would even think they would remove the save from your console?

 

[Kafkaus00]

I think this is an obvious fact also, who would even think they would remove the save from your console?

Ikr, i mean Nintendo is pretty bad but that would be another level of greed.

 

[TimeMaster]

Ikr, i mean Nintendo is pretty bad but that would be another level of greed.

That would be too much greed. I don't think the person who posted that knows what an ONLINE service is

 

[Ericthegreat]

Why the hell would you want a NES controller if you cant play NES games?

Because you can pirate them.

 

[Deleted member 331788]

If there were Snes games, I would reconsider my opinion, but NES games? Boring AF.

Phase 1, nes games ...and $60 nes controllers that only work with the nes games!
Phase 2, snes games ...and $80 snes controllers that only work with the snes games!
Phase 3, n64 games ...and $100 n64 controllers that only work with the n64 games!
Phase 4, Switch is dead!

 

[DarthDub]

I'm hacking my Switch.

 

[kuwanger]

Then yet again on the nes mini. It's amazing that the latter still sold,

Just goes to show you how much people will pay for convenience + nostalgia. That and presumably at least some of these people never owned a gba/ds, wii, 3ds, or wii u, so just buying the games as one bundle would be cheaper if that's all they wanted. More, though, I think it's easier to argue that a fool and his money are easily parted--and I'm definitely not immune to that. It also goes to show how Nintendo could make a killing if it sold a VM + $1 NES games on Steam. Sega is doing something similar, and their biggest fault is excluding so many games.

Now you get games with your online service that were made before "internet" was a word.

Just to be needlessly technical, like most computer science stuff the word "internet" is from the 1970s.

 

[FAST6191]

Curious to see so many saying now they will hack their Switch. Did you all expect something better than this?

As for cost of service possibly in some way justifying this

Just had a look.
To rent a dedicated server with a proper service level agreement
Intel Xeon E5-1650v3
6c/12t - 3.5GHz /3.8GHz
128GB DDR4 ECC 2133 MHz
SoftRAID 2x2TB
500 Mbps bandwidth

Basically a higher end enterprise server. Might have to figure out limiting factors but that would be a lot of concurrent players in most of the sorts of games we see today. For your little indy game with the average player counts* it is possibly even overkill. Might go looking to see if another one has some better bandwidth (gig or 10 gig) or tacking on some kind of multicast service as that concerns me a bit. This also assumes server operations and not p2p/direct play.

Some £150 a month (more like 120 without VAT which companies don't pay/can claim back, consider also that most hosting providers would love a lump sum and will do you a deal there as well).

12 months, 5 years, 5 regions (NA, EU, Japan, maybe Australia/NZ, Russia maybe or split the US in two).
£45000 in UK prices (not a cheap country for this sort of thing by any means). Be under the wing of someone like EA or Ubisoft and you can probably drop that further if they most likely have their own in house setups.

Prices for that will go down too, if your player count drops then you can probably scale it back or up as necessary.

Have you seen the advertising budgets of some games lately? £45000 (remember this is 5 years all at once) is nothing really. Scale that up a few more times for redundancy or additional resources and it is still not much if your budget is several million, maybe not quite the rounding error of the initial things but eh.

* http://www.vgchartz.com/platform/83/nintendo-switch/ (VGChartz I know but I am going with it).
Super Bomberman R (I know FIFA 18 technically sold more but given football's lack of popularity in the US... also it was still only 1 million total) sold apparently 0.76 million worldwide and is thus one of the top non nintendo franchises with online play. Said fraction North America 0.23 Europe 0.31 Japan 0.17 and everywhere else 0.05. That is totals as well. Not sure what estimate we would use for concurrent player counts but after the initial surge I don't imagine it is more than a few thousand (I think I just heard a bomberman fan wish for that much as well), certainly vgchartz's page for the game lists sales in a "period" in the thousands.

For early months you might want to rent a few more servers. Many years ago my game of atomic bomberman ran on next to nothing (not sure if I want to claim dial up but I might) and functionally is just like this (atomic might have even had larger maps, more items, player counts and whatnot).

 

[the_randomizer]

Phase 1, nes games ...and $60 nes controllers that only work with the nes games!
Phase 2, snes games ...and $80 snes controllers that only work with the snes games!
Phase 3, n64 games ...and $100 n64 controllers that only work with the n64 games!
Phase 4, Switch is dead!

I wouldn't put it past them

 

[Metoroid0]

Just thought I would post this interesting tidbit that Satoru Iwata said once:

"I don't think its reasonable to make someone pay for a game and then make them prepare a network connection and charge a monthly fee"

I never thought id say this for anyone but... i miss that man..he was a true visionarry and a good man!

the one man i imagined if i meet him i will drink a sake with him...

truly great times under him.... he has many great quotes, he truly cared for gamers... he was one...

 

[DSAndi]

Nintendo has tried to have backwards compatibility on as many systems as possible up until the switch. And instead of forcing you to buy all these games for 5 to 20 dollars Each, they offer you them free with their service which costs a literal 5 cents US per day to have. 5 Cents. "oh noes my saves don't save" Your saves will save on your switch. What is the problem here? Ya'll just want more free shit. When they offered free shit on their old systems "oh they are trash they can't do online for shit" so they fix it and want some fees for the upkeep Probably not even profiting off it. So lets bash on em some more cuz we are sad at 5 cents a day.

Mate i dont know what you smokin. The SNES could not play NES Games. The N64 could not play SNES Games, the Gamecobe could not play N64 carts.
Well when i think about Wii and Gamecube well, for me the Wii was mainly a gamecube with motion controll and thats it.
I cant say anything about Wii U, i guess it emulates Wii Stuff quite well. Backward compatibility on switch with Wii U ? none.
You might have a point on handheld systems, but again i stopped at the DS Lite.
While i actually find the DS Lite game libary pretty good i get bored with Nintendos Home consoles, not offering games im interested it. I morly see the same game titels on any console again and again. Thouse might be different more and less, but basicly im not interesed in thouse anymore. Or in other words i cant stand em anymore.

As for the exsample of the NES games. Who really wants that crap ? i did not own a NES back then, i had an Comodore Amiga at that time and that was a lot better then the NES, that was released 1 year later in Europe.
Im sure there are a few nice games, but overall im not interested in any of them.

Aside from that i did experience the Nintendo Online Service in the past and overall it was bad. Sure you coud play with and against other people, but buying online content again and again one a new system instead of binding it to an account, they bind it on a console.
There where other issues aswell.

See you can buy as many Nintendo producs you want and pay for online service, but i dont even buy any of Nintendos Hardware anymore, because Nintendo offers nothing interesting for me.

I bash on em because thats is how they treat customers too. FYI i also dont own a PS4 or XBO, mainly because most games come out on PC too in better quality. Games there are cheaper and really i dont have much time to play games anymore.
Getting me a console would be waste of money for me.

If you think 20$ is worth it for playing online and a few games than go pay it. By doin so you show other companys that this a a good cash grab for usually free services.

Better option dont do it, dont support em more and maybe even sell the switch.

Actually Nintendo could offer a streaming service for 20$ a month and let you stream the Nintendo libery on other systems or do more porting on the Nvidia Shield ATV like in China.
But im still not interested.

 

[Huntereb]

Curious to see so many saying now they will hack their Switch. Did you all expect something better than this?

As for cost of service possibly in some way justifying this

Just had a look.
To rent a dedicated server with a proper service level agreement
Intel Xeon E5-1650v3
6c/12t - 3.5GHz /3.8GHz
128GB DDR4 ECC 2133 MHz
SoftRAID 2x2TB
500 Mbps bandwidth

...

Woah buddy! You seem to be implying the service isn't peer-to-peer! Now scale your costs back to a few raspberry pi's and a couple gigabit or two of bandwidth for the matchmaking and routing alone.

 

[Kafkaus00]

It’s just mind-blowing that some actual people thought this through. Are they actually aware of how bad it is ? How hard is it to make people happy ?

I wish we could see a meeting at Nintendo Japan.