Topic: Pokemon Shield Unable To Use Under Profile?

Forgive me on this, I am not a Switch expert by any means, I have a 12 and a 10 year old and they play it.

Several days ago, I purchased a copy of the Pokemon Shield game, and my daughter downloaded it to the Switch using the code that was sent to my email (the main email we use for purchases on the Switch).

Under the "Select a user" when you select a game to play, there are 5 different user profiles on the switch:

1) My daughter

2) My son

3) Mine (I have only ever used it once for about 5 minutes, they wanted to show me something, in a different game)

4) Their mom

5) A random profile my daughter uses for other games

She played the entire game and finished it, but she was still going in and getting more pokemon that she hadn't gotten. This was all done on her profile, profile (1).

Her brother played under profile (2), but he didn't play near as much.

My daughter was trying to get a rare pokemon for her pokedex (? not sure what that is) so she could use it in battles. She soft reset the game, then she went back into the game, and nothing had happened. She saved at a different point, redid the soft reset, but upon trying to go back into the game, she could no longer log in under her profile.

In fact, now, the only profile that anyone can log in on, out of the five profiles listed above, is their mom's profile. The kicker? No one ever played this game under that profile. No one even logged into the game under that profile.

If you attempt to log in on any of the other 4 profiles, you get the following pop-up message:

"This user cannot play this software. If you have not purchased the software, you can do so from Nintendo eShop. Visit the Nintendo Support website for more information. support.nintendo.com/switch/activate

Cancel | Nintendo eShop

There are several other games on the Switch, on any of them, you can play from any of the five profiles. This all started happening after she attempted the soft reset (which I have no idea what she was doing, I don't understand any of this to be honest, that makes it that much more difficult to fix?)

Under her mom's profile, there is zero game progress, as stated above, no one ever played on that profile.

My daughter was able to log her profile (1) into "Pokemon Home" (? not sure what that means), went to the Shield game inside of Home (? again, confuses me, apparently she says this is different from the Shield game itself???), and was able to move the pokemon that were in the boxes on that game, from Pokemon Shield to Pokemon Home.

This included all of the Pokemon that she gained from playing the entire Pokemon Shield game, so wouldn't that indicate that somehow, somewhere, this game is actually saved, likely under her profile?

And if that is the case, why isn't she able to log in on her profile into Pokemon Shield itself, why don't any of the other profiles work?

I did try reading up on this, search engines give so many completely useless returns on requests these days.

Does anyone out there have a solution for this? I wish I knew more about the Switch, this seems completely crazy...

https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Support/Nintendo-Switch/Error-Mess...
Is the official advice... Effectively, if your daughter used the code for her own profile, that should be the same as if she'd purchased it herself, though
So, check the console is up to date & connected to Internet, just in case. Maybe others here will have more ideas

Yes, I read that page, two parts stick out:

"Once you've registered a primary console, your digital purchases can be played by anyone that uses the primary console." This was how it WAS working, as implied, upon purchase, up until she did that "soft reset" of the game.

"When using a non-primary console, you are the only player that can access downloadable software that you've purchased. Other players will not be able to access your downloadable software on a non-primary console." And now it almost seems as though the Shield game thinks it is on a non-primary console, and worse, that the only player who can access the game isn't even a player who ever played it before?

The game was never played on another switch, not even sure how you would do that with a digital download to begin with.

You'd log into your account on it & download the software, @fraNkMinion.... If this isn't the only Switch, it may be that somehow another one has become the primary console?
You are sure that it wasn't her mum that used the code to download the game, too?

@fraNkMinion A question, how was the soft reset done?
Soft reset is the ability to restart the software without closing it and that's not even doable in Sword and Shield and only a regular reset (closing the software and restarting it) works.
Note: If your daughter was simply closing and restarting the game I don't think that has anything to do with the problem.

Anyway something easy to do here is to access the eShop on the switch on every profile and check which one actually has the game registered on it. While I doubt this will solve the issue, it will at least make a little more clear where the problem may be.

@BruceCM "The game was never played on another switch" Stated that just before.

@BakaKnight

She says she pressed the home button, closed the game, then re-entered the game.

She's currently trying to re-download the game onto her profile. I think she's been able to save all the pokemon she gathered, but worst case scenario is that all her played content (aside from the pets) is gone.

@fraNkMinion Then as I mentioned there's no way the soft reset caused the problem.
And if she can redownload the game by access her own profile on the eShop then also the purchase is rightly registered.

Even in the worst case, it sound like a small system error. If nothing else works, resetting the console to factory settings may be a solution (just make sure to google how to do it without deleting the savedata).

So, it appears that the game was originally downloaded onto her mom's user profile, which is odd because I ordered it on my email, which is completely different from her mom's email, unless the game shop email can be completely different from the profile you download the purchased game to?

Then things got bizarre, apparently there are several emails over the last 2 to 3 days that their mom has gotten that show multiple login attempts on different browsers from different locations from Brazil to the Ukraine, including a Nintendo Switch that is showing in Brazil.

This would coincide with when all of these problems started happening. I'm wondering if someone was able to hack into their mom's account, moved the primary console to THEIR switch, to try and get ahold of the games, and who knows what else? She thinks that her primary console is an older Nintendo 3DS though, do they match up that way? Or is the primary console specific to the type of console and you have one primary 3DS and one primary Switch?

Their mom has changed the password to be sure no one can get in.

Again, all new to me, I appreciate your help in getting this sorted.

Okay, so her mom was able to get ahold of someone from Nintendo, not sure how, I tried all afternoon to no avail LOL.

Her account was hacked. Someone in Brazil had connected her account to a different Switch, and went online to disconnect the account from our switch (primary), which locked us out from being able to do the same thing. Because the Pokemon Shield game was the one game that had been downloaded to her mom's account (by mistake, from MY paypal logged in on MY account, don't get that one Nintendo??), no other users on our Twitch could play that game. We could continue to play the rest of the games, on any user, but not Shield.

Someone at Nintendo got it all fixed, kids got all their progress back, the guy in Brazil is locked out and banned, and I changed every password associated with OUR switch.

Thanks for your help guys, I didn't want to believe it was a hack, that is the "go to" excuse for people who mess things up, so I generally try to fix everything on my end before accepting that someone has snuck into whatever program/platform I'm using.

The interesting thing is that my daughter found it all, my exwife wasn't even aware that her account had been hacked, it was on an old email, she logged in and there were like a dozen emails over the last 3 days of people logging in from all over the world. (probably one location using proxies). Wild stuff.

@fraNkMinion It does not matter what e-mail you used to buy the download code. It matters what account was logged in when you entered the code and downloaded the game. When the game was downloaded it sounds like the mother's account was used to access the eshop and enter the code.

Those emails suggest that someone broke the password for the mother's account and logged it. If it's showing different countries they are probably using a VPN to fake their location. Either way you need to change the password. Furthermore if you had a credit card attached to the account, check to see if any purchases were made. Nintendo recently put out a warning that there were more people than normal attempting fraud on their system. If there were unauthorized purchases you'll want to contact Nintendo directly and your credit card company.

Oh, and the 3DS is completely seperate from the Switch. That would not affect it at all. The primary Switch feature is just a security feature to prevent one person from buying a game and just giving his password out to let a bunch of other people "redownload" the game on their own systems.

So I believe the credit card attached to her email login was expired some time ago, because I've been handling purchases the last few years on the Switch (she had been buying stuff for them on the 3DS).

It was really quick after she got ahold of them on the phone, they had everything fixed, even the progress both kids had on their profiles was good.

I get the security features, it is just tough with everything going on, Nintendo like everyone else is running minimal staff, and I'm not one that really wants to say "oh, it was hacked" because so often people who don't know what they are doing just default to the "hacked" excuse as to why something doesn't work.

That being said, after spending hours trying to help my daughter get this situation sorted out, trying not to blame her for whatever was going on, it is a bit of a relief to find out that it was not anything she did, and that, although being hacked is not good, at least now we know what in the world was going on. I thought I was going to lose my mind earlier LOL.

@fraNkMinion So it's all sorted out? I'm glad to hear that. And also glad your credit cards were not compromised. Take care, stay safe.

Maybe try out that profile of yours. You might find yourself having fun too.