We Shouldn’t Have To Pay For The Switch 2 Social Features

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home April 6, 2025 11 Views 5 Min Read
We Shouldn't Have To Pay For The Switch 2 Social Features



It was bizarre watching Nintendo act like it had just invented Discord, rolling out such revolutionary ideas as video chatting with your friends, using a microphone, sharing your screen (at a resounding 4fps), and, oh, this is a good one, playing games with people who aren’t in the same room as you! It’s like couch co-op, but… over the internet!? Woah.

It was like your dad finding an Impact font meme saying “I Can Has Cheezburger?” and showing it to you in the age of brain rot TikToks. It was painfully out of touch, and the six minutes dedicated to a basic function — that everyone was forced to use in the pandemic just a few years ago anyway — were hard to watch. We know, Nintendo, we’ve been begging you to add parties for a while now. But hey, at least it’s finally happening. As awkward as the reveal was, that’s exciting.

Then came the ugly mic drop (not of the mic itself, which is built-in and, therefore, not ugly), intentionally left to the very end. You need an NSO subscription.

nintendo switch 2 game chat.
via Nintendo

It’s been overshadowed a little by the $400 Switch 2 price tag, the $80 triple-A games, and the weird Welcome Tour tech demo that should be free. But the mandatory NSO subscription to simply talk with your friends is as egregious as everything else on that list.

Nintendo is very generously making GameChat free until March 31, 2026 — how about extending that… permanently?

Even PlayStation and Xbox, which require you to pay a subscription fee to play online, let you sit in parties for free. That was always huge for me growing up. Even if I didn’t have PlayStation Plus or Xbox Gold, I wasn’t left out of game nights with my friends. I could still hop on a party and chat while they played Call of Duty after school. Now, you need to pay the Nintendo tax. I just hope Microsoft and Sony don’t follow suit.

It’s especially confusing in the age of free-to-play juggernauts like Fortnite, which doesn’t require an NSO subscription to play. That means you can party with your friends and compete in the battle royale spectacle, but not talk to them. Nintendo has never been great at facilitating online multiplayer either, having few first-parties to brag about, so GameChat will primarily be used by people playing single-player games while chatting at the same time, something that the six-minute reel made an effort to focus on through titles like Zelda and Mario.

Paying to do that seems silly — in the immortal words of modern philosopher Wyatt Cheng, “Do you guys not have phones?” At our fingertips, we have Discord, Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and even Xbox and PlayStation Party. If you don’t have NSO, you’re better off plugging in your headphones and talking over one of the many free alternatives, which, frankly, look better than GameChat.

A lot of people already have NSO, so this isn’t a problem for a good chunk of Switch users. But Nintendo has always been the console giant for casual players, bringing newcomers into the hobby with affordable price points, family-oriented platformers and party games, and more intuitive features.

With the Switch 2’s announcement and some of the priciest markups in the industry, it feels like Nintendo is stepping away from that mentality, and paying to talk to your friends flies in the face of its old principles, revealing everything wrong with the next generation months before it’s even begun.

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