Nintendo is finally taking a modern approach to its online services as the company confirmed that the Nintendo Switch 2 will carry over your current account. That’s right, Nintendo won’t force anyone to start from scratch after constantly forcing players to make new accounts for new systems.
Shuntaro Furukawa, the president of Nintendo, confirmed that the next system would implement their current hardware’s online accounts during a shareholder's meeting. A translation from Twitter user Genki claims that this is being done to provide a smooth transition from their current system to the next.
While this is pretty normal for PlayStation and Xbox fans, this is slightly new to Nintendo users. Although there have been accounts that shared user names, they never allowed purchased games from one system to be playable in the next. It was frustrating buying Super Mario Bros. 3 on the Wii U and not being able to play it on the 3DS.
Hopefully, the Switch 2 is a wake-up call for Nintendo so that fans won’t have to re-purchase games they already own. Fans already swallowed a bitter pill when they bought Wii U re-releases on the Switch. Now that these older accounts will be integrated, that shouldn’t be a problem anymore.
As we mentioned earlier, account integration isn’t exactly a new feature for PlayStation and Xbox owners. Currently, PlayStation owners who have had their accounts since the PS3 and PSP days can buy PS4 games and play them on PS5. It’s even better for Xbox Series owners, who can play Xbox One, Xbox 360, and original Xbox games on their new console.
Previous job listings did suggest that Nintendo is already planning to bring their current NSO emulators to the next system, which is a good step. Hopefully, the same thing will happen to full-blown Switch games, especially on the digital side. Nintendo is usually pretty cool with backwards compatibility so let’s hope this is the case again.
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No word on when the Switch 2 will be coming out, though the company did state that news on the system wouldn’t be revealed until March 2024, at the earliest.