Though Nintendo's online service is launching soon, full information is sparse. One piece of knowledge has been revealed recently, likely accidentally due to the delayed direct, however, in regards to cloud saves. If you pay for Nintendo Switch Online, which gives you cloud save support, you might want to know that not all of your games will be compatible. Certain listings for games on Nintendo's site specify that they will not work with Save Data Cloud backup. These listings include Pokemon Let's Go, Splatoon 2, Dark Souls Remastered, Dead Cells, FIFA 19, NBA 2K19, and NBA Playgrounds.

For the above games that are multiplatform, they do indeed support cloud save support on other consoles with PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Gold.

Nintendo Switch Online membership (sold separately) and Nintendo Account required for online play. This game does not support Save Data Cloud backup.

Source: Nintendo Official Site

 

[AbyssalMonkey]

The economics of people paying against their own interest.

A lot of this is just excuses and not even good excuses. Once again, since you seem to skip right over it, PC seems to be doing just fine.

As for not paying for games that has paid online (which is looking to be most of them, if not all), that I planned to play online heavily, I already planned not to buy them now. That doesn't mean I'm going stop saying how nonsensical this all is. It was nonsense back then and it is still nonsense now.

People paying against their own self interests? This is paying for a service. Companies could simply not provide it. You demanded it, they offered it. They have zero obligation to give it away. Businesses are not a charity. If you feel that paying for services online is paying against your own self interest, I suggest you completely stop browsing the internet, companies are collecting all the data they could ever want off you for free and then selling it for money. By browsing the internet you are going against your own self interest.

Your dismissal of "PC is doing fine" is a blanket statement. It's not useful. The fact of the matter is this: Nintendo is providing a service that they are supporting, with all the costs involved. To expect to not have to pay for it is blatant and inexcusable entitlement. You sound like a child who just got told by his parents that they will no longer let them live at home for free; yet complain that it was free before.

The core of the matter is the fact that Nintendo has no way of backing up saves officially, and now that they are doing so, it is tied to an online cloud server. This wouldn't be a discussion if Nintendo had an official way to do offline backups. The ability to backup your saves and the cost of paying for the cloud server should have been two different issues, but Nintendo is conflating them, leading to this mess. If you had a way to back up your own saves to the SD card, you could feasibly plug it into a device, store it on your own personal server, and then retrieve it when needed. Nintendo is offering to do this service for a fee. Stop complaining about having to pay for it and instead demand offline backups.

I already stated why I think Nintendo is doing this on page two: security. They don't want to take any chances of a third party modifying a save file into a payload to crack their system. All data pertaining to the console must go through them. There are other ways of doing this, such as encrypting the save so that you can't turn it into a payload by tampering with it, but that's still a risk.

So you're happy paying for half assed stuffs? Look what happens when people became vocal with the xone during its first year, it forced Ms to listen and it gave us a better product and its services now is way even better than sony or nintendo could offer.

People aren't happy paying for half assed stuff. But people still bought the xone which showed microsoft people were still interested. The difference in the scenarios here is that this is a brand new service for Nintendo; they have no baseline. Nintendo has no idea how much people will actually be using this service, so if no one buys it, they will just abandon the project. The situation with the xone was different, microsoft knew they had an audience, they had sales data from their previous consoles and people used that leverage against them by refusing to purchase the system. Microsoft saw the money they were losing and acted to rectify the situation. As far as Nintendo is concerned, this is a gamble. People can complain all they want, but if at the end of the day this new service doesn't show market viability, they will kill it. The only way for customers to show real interest and market viability is to buy it. It can be half-assed and broken as it wants to be, but Nintendo won't spend any more money on it if it fails to garner any market attention. End of story.

The amount of critical thinking being done in this thread is astoundingly low. All I see are entitled crybabies who either demand things for free or can't see past the fact that Nintendo doesn't want to give them support for business reasons.

 

[noahc3]

This is a paid service. Games like Pokemon make sense due to the possible exploitation, but you cannot sell a service and then turn around and tell us that many major titles on your platform are not compatible with it for no apparent reason. What a joke.

 

[KingVamp]

I think the difference here is that the Switch is racking up new users left and right, so naturally they are going to want to strengthen their online infrastructure to make the experience more reliable. Hell, why do you think some MMOs have monthly subscription fees? Thousands of users being connected at once costs money, both in terms of actual servers, and the cost of bandwidth. With the Wii U, they probably didn't have to worry about that, because - well - the Wii U speaks for itself. Another factor here is Nintendo's recent record of financial losses. They've only just recently been making financial gains, so this whole thing is probably to make up for some of that loss. What I see here ultimately is that this whole thing seems to be their way of bringing back a sort of "Club Nintendo" thing, but with online play baked in so they can get more subscribers.

Except they planned this before the Switch was even out. No plans like this was said before the Wii U came out. A lot of MMOs have moved to a f2p model and people can do private servers. Also, unlike MMOs, most games are peer to peer. My Nintendo is the, not so good, replacement for Club Nintendo and Club Nintendo didn't hold the online hostage. They can keep making financial gains without putting online behind a paywall.

 

[B.B.Link]

• Mario Odyssey
• BOTW
• Splatoon 2
• Arms
• Mk8d
• Smash soon(tm)

3 of then are ports, though...

 

[Delerious]

Except they planned this before the Switch was even out. No plans like this was said before the Wii U came out. A lot of MMOs have moved to a f2p model and people can do private servers. Also, unlike MMOs, most games are peer to peer. My Nintendo is the, not so good, replacement for Club Nintendo and Club Nintendo didn't hold the online hostage. They can keep making financial gains without putting online behind a paywall.

Either way, they wanted to prepare a system to make more money, even more so to make up for their losses over recent years. That doesn't mean it's cool of them to do it, and it certainly doesn't mean that they can't keep making money without it. But in the business perspective, they want a stronger overhead, especially for that reason. Anyway, what can you do but vote with your wallet? That or make a change.org petition, but we all know how those pan out.

And yeah, My Nintendo is shit. I can foresee them eliminating it soon after getting the online service up and running, unless they pull a stupid move and make My Nintendo the reward system for being a subscriber. If they do, then for their sake, they'd best improve it.

 

[Eddypikachu]

I'm still not paying for this subscription, not now and most likely never

 

[APartOfMe]

3 of then are ports, though...

3 of them? The only ports I see are mk8d and botw

 

[KingVamp]

People paying against their own self interests? This is paying for a service. Companies could simply not provide it. You demanded it, they offered it. They have zero obligation to give it away. Businesses are not a charity. If you feel that paying for services online is paying against your own self interest, I suggest you completely stop browsing the internet, companies are collecting all the data they could ever want off you for free and then selling it for money. By browsing the internet you are going against your own self interest.

Your dismissal of "PC is doing fine" is a blanket statement. It's not useful. The fact of the matter is this: Nintendo is providing a service that they are supporting, with all the costs involved. To expect to not have to pay for it is blatant and inexcusable entitlement. You sound like a child who just got told by his parents that they will no longer let them live at home for free; yet complain that it was free before.

No one demanded pay online. They shoved it down our throats with no free option. Unfortunately some people got trick into it and some people kept making excuses for them. Now things just keep getting worse for consoles and I don't see an end to it unless enough people stop paying for it and complain about it.

Sure and I, and many others, have zero obligation not to complain about it.

That comparison is nonsensical and insincere. Not only are they not suppose to be taking that data, they have been getting in trouble for it, and at least I have some means to help protect myself. I'm not browsing the internet for people to use my data, I'm using it to browse. I have no means to play online on this console or consoles in general, without paying for it.

So I guess all those PC gamers that actually stood and stand up against this nonsense and still have free online, are like entitled children?

Stop complaining about having to pay for it and instead demand offline backups.

The amount of critical thinking being done in this thread is astoundingly low. All I see are entitled crybabies who either demand things for free or can't see past the fact that Nintendo doesn't want to give them support for business reasons.

Because we can't complain about paying for it and demand offline backups? Wait, you want us to demand offline backups? I thought they wasn't obligated to give us anything and any outcry is entitlement.

No, what you see is legitimate anger and complaints.

 

[Ericthegreat]

Looking at it, the tl;dr is that it won't work for games with monstrously large save files, or games where the feature could be abused. It's fair enough to be honest.

Not really because we should own our save files, and be able to back it up to a SD card if we want, if they wanted for it not abused, they could've just let the switch encrypt it upon backup....

 

[Deathscreton]

Fuck man. It's a joke at this point. They're tiptoeing between a handheld online service and a home console service, they're trying to do both and failing at it all. I don't see this coming back.

Even pokemon not having cloud saves doesn't make sense. If they're THAT worried about duping, just make it force cloud save if the option is enabled. Anytime the game saves, the cloud saves. Or force cloud saves on trade. There are a million better ways to do this than the way Ninty chose to do it.

 

[RattletraPM]

I see no problem with Nintendo getting ports, the Switch is far from been unappealing and sells show its doing well

Only problem for me is paid online + so-so cloud saves support + no local save backups support

Now those are real problems

Ports normally are not a real problem, but the lack of exclusives during a console's early life is. Also mind you, I didn't say the Switch is generally unappealing: it's actually a very good system if portability is what you're after or if it's the only modern one you have. But going back to the previous argument and it doesn't take too much for it to become less and less interesting, all you need is one more system and the list of interesting titles plummets. I'm not even saying you need to be a collector or have a masterrace-grade PC, some of the ports are of games that have been out for years now so literally only a PS4 or a medium (sometimes even low) end PC will do. Plus if you've got a laptop and that title is available for PC not even the argument of portability stands.

Finally if sales is what you go by then the Switch has sold really well on its first year of its life, so much so that if it kept up it would've surpassed PS4 sales, I'll give you that. But while it's still selling well there is a trend showing a decline which again, might not be worrying yet (and everyone knows Pokémon is going to bump up sales) but still not something you'd want to see in your console's second year of its life. And that was before Ninty fully unveiled the full details of its online service.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...tch-sales-near-20m-down-slightly-on-last-year
Now, don't get me wrong - I don't want the Switch to fail. Hell no, there is a reason why I'm considering wheter to buy one. But if you add up a yet too small list of exclusive, paywalled online multiplayer, the lack of VC titles (with the only ones being a few select titles for online subscribers - a small point but still infuriating if you consider that every single modern Nintendo console had it) and now disappointing services, ehh... I'll wait and see for now.

 

[PatrickD85]

in short; Nintendo online is going to be a joke YET AGAIN.
When will they ever learn ...

 

[Maid_Nanashi]

This is why we modded our Switchs
So we could back up our saves.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

kek. Good ol' Nintendo, there are so many ways around the whole "abuse" thing, this just tells me Nintendo either cares more about fighting cheaters than their entire userbase, or they just can't be bothered to make a decent online service, paid for or not.

Knowing Nintendo, I'm sure it's both.

 

[Deleted User]

Here’s their update that I took from gameinformer
Update (8:54 p.m. CT): Nintendo responded to our request for comment, stating that the lack of cloud saves is because of item duplication possibilities.

"The vast majority of Nintendo Switch games will support Save Data Cloud backup. However, in certain games this feature would make it possible to, for example, regain items that had been traded to other players, or revert to a higher online multiplayer ranking that had been lost. To ensure fair play, Save Data Cloud backup may not be enabled for such games. To ensure that Save Data Cloud backups cannot be used to unfairly affect online multiplayer rankings, the feature will not be enabled in Splatoon 2."

 

[RattletraPM]

Here’s their update that I took from gameinformer
Update (8:54 p.m. CT): Nintendo responded to our request for comment, stating that the lack of cloud saves is because of item duplication possibilities.

"The vast majority of Nintendo Switch games will support Save Data Cloud backup. However, in certain games this feature would make it possible to, for example, regain items that had been traded to other players, or revert to a higher online multiplayer ranking that had been lost. To ensure fair play, Save Data Cloud backup may not be enabled for such games. To ensure that Save Data Cloud backups cannot be used to unfairly affect online multiplayer rankings, the feature will not be enabled in Splatoon 2."

That's a bullshit excuse if I ever heard one. Item duplication could be a possibility but restrictions could have been put in place to deter or limit when and how save backups & restores could happen, not to mention server-side verification or storage could make any attempts next to useless. But for multiplayer rankings... really? That's the best excuse you got, Nintendo?

This screams of "we don't want to invest money in a better infrastucture so we've gone with the least expensive method we could come up with", aka none at all.

 

[Huntereb]

My console's been able to back up and restore save data for every game since July, didn't have to pay a dime. ;v)

 

[Sakitoshi]

Here’s their update that I took from gameinformer
Update (8:54 p.m. CT): Nintendo responded to our request for comment, stating that the lack of cloud saves is because of item duplication possibilities.

"The vast majority of Nintendo Switch games will support Save Data Cloud backup. However, in certain games this feature would make it possible to, for example, regain items that had been traded to other players, or revert to a higher online multiplayer ranking that had been lost. To ensure fair play, Save Data Cloud backup may not be enabled for such games. To ensure that Save Data Cloud backups cannot be used to unfairly affect online multiplayer rankings, the feature will not be enabled in Splatoon 2."

all of those scenarios have solution, but nintendo being the incompetents they are don't know better.

>regain items that had been traded to other players
if they are worried about pokemon cloning or similar then make the game flag the save after an action that can be abused, while the save is flagged downloading from the cloud is restricted, that flag will only be lifted once you have uploaded the new save to the cloud making it impossible for anyone to clone anything.

>revert to a higher online multiplayer ranking that had been lost.
they are looking at splatoon 2 here, that's just bad online design, but don't worry I got the solution. there are actually 2 ways to handle that:
1. in the next game update remove the online part of the save so only the offline story mode elements remain, you could still play the offline part of the game just fine and your rank and everything will be completely handled by the online server.
2. leave the local save alone but instead add checks on the server, the server will hold a copy of your save and check the online part of it, if it doesn't match then replaces your local save with the one stored in the server, additionally the server can scold the player or ban it temporarily for trying to cheat. the offline part of the save will be left alone as it's irrelevant.

 

[garyopa]

cheating is their official reason, see below:

Nintendo has given us a comment concerning an earlier story we printed on the lack of consistent cloud saves on the Switch. Nintendo believes limiting cloud saves to certain games will prevent cheating. Read the full story here: https://t.co/jdb8MQbpLE pic.twitter.com/wuB2keYIqR

— Game Informer (@gameinformer) September 8, 2018

nintendo's reply:

 

[B.B.Link]

3 of them? The only ports I see are mk8d and botw

Smash is gonna be a port.