Nintendo is so proud of the feature that it even included a little C button right on your Joy-Con (which was a point of excited speculation before the reveal) so you can jump into Game Chat whenever you like.
Unfortunately, it also tried to bury the fact that this Game Chat feature will actually require a Nintendo Switch Online subscription once the free trial period ends on March 31, 2026.
Now, you may be wondering what the button does if you don’t have a subscription? Thankfully, Nintendo’s vice president of player and product experience, Bill Trinen, was interviewed by Polygon on that very same topic. Trinen explains that the button will let you “find out about the NSO subscription there and get a sense of some of the functionality.” It’s basically a button that asks you to pay up.
It’s basically a button that asks you to pay up
We’ve gotten to the point where button functions are microtransactions…
This is why I emulate games and just use Linux
Lots of Nintendo suckers in here, huh. As for me, I vowed to never buy anything from them anymore, after they tried to basically patent summoning in games.
But…but…you are missing out on the privilege to pay 80 moneys for 10+ year old games!!
I know, I almost gave in when I heard of the new Pokemario game…
Why do people post screenshots of articles? You even quoted it!
Post a damn link!
The screenshot also includes the date, marking the article over 16 months old.
I remember this article from, oh, it says it right there, April 2025. Turns out no one who owns the things actually cares. And if you do, you pay for NSO.
Yes another Nintendo hit piece that nobody who actually plays NS2 gives a shit about.
If I’m playing with friends, I’m in discord on PC and console.
If I’m playing NS2 it’s almost always alone.
A I’m playing NS2 with friends, it’s on the couch at their house.
Everyone defending Nintendo in here for their online subscription fees are actually the mildly infuriating part for me personally. I’m a game developer and once attempted to develop an online game on Switch and other consoles. It was surprising to me to learn that exactly zero of the profits they rake in from their player base goes towards providing any server architecture whatsoever for developers on the platforms to use. This means that all costs associated with hosting servers for online functionality of games on the platform are the responsibility of each developer.
I fail to see what service they are providing apart from enabling players to access the Internet on a device they already paid for. I really don’t think players understand this.
I also think it’s important to point out that it’s at least twice as difficult to get a game through Nintendo Lotcheck aka certification if you have any online features whatsoever due to their extreme requirements, which ends up costing a lot more development time. Steam on the other hand has an almost non existent certification process and charges players nothing to access the Internet.
I will end my rant with one more important point. I had my switch stolen a while back. I had been playing Animal Crossing for years, all through the pandemic and had a very nicely curated island and house. I had been paying for Nintendo Online monthly and had my island backed up. However I didn’t purchase a new switch right away due to financial reasons and speed thought it foolish to keep paying my Nintendo Online membership so I canceled. After about 2 years I saw they announced a new update and finally had some extra money so I found a used Switch online. To my dismay, even though I reactivated my Nintendo Online subscription, Nintendo deleted my entire cloud save data repository for all my games, including Animal Crossing due to having not paid in over 12 months. This is unacceptable. Steam has not charged me a penny for online cloud service in all my years of having an account which started back on in the days of CS1.6. They have every save data file for every game I’ve ever played with zero threat of deletion. I cannot believe Nintendo thinks they were justified in deleting my data. I had to start Animal Crossing over from scratch. Needless to say I will not be subscribing to Nintendo Online ever again. Do not trust them with your data.
It was surprising to me to learn that exactly zero of the profits they rake in from their player base goes towards providing any server architecture whatsoever for developers on the platforms to use.
To me this was always the most insane part. Like I would pay for e.g. Xbox Live if it is stable, free of cheaters, etc. but they will not get me to pay for peer-to-peer how it’s with Nintendo’s own games. :O
How long should Nintendo save your data when you aren’t paying them? Why should they keep it for any length of time?
Nintendo has qualification processes because bad games almost destroyed the industry in the 80s.
Steam doesn’t ensure quality. How would steam possibly try to charge for internet access on a device they didn’t produce, control, or sell you?
Businesses charge users for things that users value. Simple as that. It isn’t unique to Nintendo or the games industry. Cell phone folks charged for texts that didn’t cost them anything to deliver. Why? People valued texts and were willing to pay. We got out of that because of Apple but now people are angry at Apple about it.
So two things:
- Nintendo doesn’t do the quality check thing anymore, it’s just a seal that it’s licensed Nintendo goods - https://www.mariowiki.com/Official_Nintendo_Seal
- Steam provides cloud backup for free and does provide some other network tools (to my recollection).
I’m sorry, have you seen the amount of absolute crap on the Nintendo eShop? What qualification process? It’s a wasteland there.
Also, Steam being open means you can also use an app like Ludusavi to make your own savegame backups, just in case.
Nintendon’t
Nothing burger. You need an online subscription to play online, like every console. How many people are realistically going to use a Nintendo Switch to hop on Game Chat and NOT play online games with the people you are chatting with?
It’s more just that the controller has a button that is tied to an online subscription only feature. You need to pay for online services for Playstation and Xbox too, but neither have dedicated controller buttons that are tied to any of those features.
But they do have dedicated buttons for share/record/streaming and other social gaming activities. You can’t reassign them either. Social gaming activities is what Nintendo is doing here, essentially. The article makes it seem like “oh no I can’t jump in Mario if I don’t pay a monthly fee”. They’re providing a button shortcut if you want to use their game chat when you’re online gaming. It is useless if you’re not online gaming anyway. There is no issue here. Blame Nintendo for the actually bad things they do, we don’t need to make up problems.
Sure, but those share buttons can be used offline, no subscription required. I just use them for screenshots/short clip capture that I send to my personal devices.
But game chat is a dead button to anyone who doesn’t pay. Like it’s fine to lock the chat feature behind the subscription, I get that. But it’s weird to make a dedicated hardware button for a feature that not everyone can use.
You can remap it to any other button or turn it off entirely. To use your example you could use it as a second capture button if you prefer it on the right controller instead of the left one
You can remap any button on the switch 2 in the settings. Game chat is just the default setting.
TV remote controls have had “pay-to-press” buttons for a long time that work in the exact same way. I press the Netflix button it asks me to subscribe to Netflix. We got to the point where “button functions are microtransactions” a long time ago.
I don’t have a Switch 2 and am not interested in getting one, but I do know rage-bait articles about non-issues. I can’t understand someone throwing a tantrum because there’s a button on their controller that they don’t need. Just ignore it?
Hey, I bought a car that has a “Bluelink+” option to talk to their support people. It’s a subscription service which I don’t pay for. It doesn’t harm me in the least that the button is there and I don’t use it. I don’t even mind that the ads for the car mention that it’s a feature. It would be weird if it did upset me.
The rational thing to do is to allow binding that key to some other function, but that wouldn’t be miserable for the users so they won’t allow that
It’s the same as with my TV remote there’s 4 buttons reserved for full-screen advertisements for shitty streaming services. At very least those buttons could do nothing when someone accidentally hits it, if rebinding is somehow too fucking difficult
But you can rebind it.
System settings -> Accessibility -> Button mapping.
I have had a switch 2 for over a year, I have yet to press the C button once.
I did not know this button existed until this post.
I’ve pressed it a couple times.
By accident of course
I bought the Switch 2 at launch with the intent to hack it, so it sits in my closet collecting dust since I’m still enjoying playing everything (including Dusklite) on my hacked Switch 1
Get out of here with your facts and rational thought, if Nintendo does something it’s automatically uniquely bad.
Especially because video games are theMOST IMPORTANT METRIC of a FUNCTIONAL SOCIETY
Article from april 7th 2025. And nobody uses it still.
Wait, you have to have an online subscription to play with other people remotely anyway… Why does it matter that you can’t use a voice chat feature without that same subscription…?
Like, as a splatoon player who played and grind-ed rank without actual game servers while paying a subscription I absolutely was and still am mad about THAT, but given that thats the case, does it matter that you can’t use voice chat without a subscription…? Am I just totally missing something?
No, that’s pretty much it.
Sure it’s annoying to have a whole button dedicated to it (I mean, even to me, I do have an online subscription but I never use that feature).
Were they planning to use their switch 2 as a phone? That would only work between switch 2s that would have to be connected, but not subscribed to any actual online service?
That thing is of very little use outside of online gaming.
Just so you know, you can remap the button or turn it off entirely in the system settings under Accessibility
I’m not sure I would use it for something else than online games.
For now, I’ve stopped due to asking my phone number.
This is a year old rage bait piece.
I have a switch2 since launch, and had no idea this was a contending point.
Personally I pay between 7€ and 11€ a year for the subscription and am fine with all that it brings.
But, like, you do understand why it’s annoying to literally include a nag button on your controller?
Just don’t use it? My PS5 controller has a media share button I’ve never used. If they suddenly made that feature pay-to-use it still wouldn’t affect me
My personal irritation would be fully proportional to how often I accidentally hit the button.
You can remap the button or disable it entirely, and it’s the least prominent button on the controller, so I think your level of irritation would be low to none.
It looks like one of those flat buttons flush with the surface of the controller. And it’s under the home button, so I feel like you’d have to be pretty deliberate to trigger it
I would never buy a device that comes with a broken button.
Guess this is not an issue then, as you can easily remap the button.
Wow wait until they find out you can do this for free on the internet for like, the last 2 decades.
“Do you guys not have phones?” - Blizzard
Now, you may be wondering what the button does if you don’t have a subscription? Unfortunately, it also tried to bury the fact that this Game Chat feature will actually require a Nintendo Switch Online subscription once the free trial period ends on March 31, 2026.
Was not this already known after the release of Switch 2? I can vaguely remember people complaining that you needed an subscription to use the particular feature and if they did not, the button was just… an useless button.
This is why I emulate games and just use Linux
I too emulate Switch 1 games but unfortunately, Switch 2 games cannot be emulated yet.
Nintendo didn’t even try to hide this, it was touted as a bonus during the launch announcement that this feature would be free for everyone to try for a limited time.
This article is ragebait. There is plenty to call Nintendo out for; “they made a feature that they TOLD US ABOUT” isn’t one of them. Trash article from trash rag.
Was not this already known after the release of Switch 2?
Yes, which is why this article is from 2025. Why OP is posting it now is anyone’s guess.
Was not this already known after the release of Switch 2?
yes, the “GameChat Welcome Offer” was talked about pretty extensively immediately after the launch.
Also, in System Settings → Accessibility → Button Mapping, you can literally remap the C button to be any other button on your controller, so calling it a useless button is just plain wrong
To be fair, it is not gonna be very usefull to remap it to any other button as the other button is also already on your controller. It would just be a duplicate function.
Not entirely useless, but also not far off. It might eventually become useful as a homebrew menu button if someone ever figures out how to hack it
Now that you mention this, I think I’ll map mine to be a home dup anyway, because the only times I push it is when I confuse it for the other one.
Maybe there’s an edge case where it would be more useful to map it to something else in split joy-con mode, not sure.
Yeah it’s situational, but based on my experience with the grip buttons on the pro controller, I’m sure there’s some games where it’d come in handy
That’s hilarious. We already decided that when the switch dies we will go steam deck all the way.
