Topic: The Nintendo Switch Online Subscription Service Thread

@NEStalgia I know I’ll need a family subscription as I have my account, children’s account which shared with my email and my wife has a Japan account which she also purchased from which I hope can be put on my family account. Only time will tell

@NEStalgia
Eeyup.

@ReaderRagfish well the next article should be. If you stop subscribing you lose the nes games and playing online

I heard if you stop paying you lose the subscription

I heard if you stop turning the console on you can’t play games.

@ReaderRagfish I never doubted that family plan members could use different consoles. But the one we don't know is if every account on one Switch needs a plan, or if one member account covers all users on their primary switch. If each player account on the local Switch needs their own subscription (or family enrollment) that works very differently than the other two consoles and is honestly pretty disingenous with the "family" plan thing. Especially since you can't buy the family plan without linking a CC to Nintendo. For anyone against doing that they'll have to buy $20 subs for individual members. That easily makes it the most expensive subscription for a family of 4 compared to other platforms.

@Yosheel @HobbitGamer Thanks, you know I somehow missed the entire family grouping thing! And missed the article yesterday on NL (the first thing a search turned up today) burried in the 300 individual Direct posts....

@NEStalgia I remember reading somewhere that every account needs a plan, regardless of if they're in the same switch or not.

@subpopz I wouldn't say old save files are worthless. I picked up Deus Ex: Human Revolution digitally for $8 or so on X1 Backward compatibility digitally last month. I had last played the game on my 360, with a disc version, in December 2011. I hadn't subscribed since then. I was near the end of the game but just never finished the last section. I bought Directors Cut on WiiU but never got around to playing again. I wasn't even thinking about cloud saves, when I bought it again digitally on my X1. So I load the game after downloading the digital copy, and it started downloading cloud saves. Almost 600mb of them. And when it was done, I was staring at the middle of the boss battle I had saved in the middle of, a few days before Christmas 2011..... That's my epic cloud save story

Unfortunately the game is horrendously ugly and hard to look at now. I really want directors cut, but it's not available digitally on X1, and I don't feel like booting my WiiU

That said you're buying into the whole Nintendo "you're buying a safety net you shouldn't get if you don't pay!" That's a strawman they created. Backing up your data should not involve a continuous payment scheme. It's your data. You have a local copy, and they are actively preventing you from backing up your own local data. They're not enabling a safety net, they're actively blocking fair use of your own data on your own SD card you paid money for (or the embedded flash in the device you paid money for), and offering to sell you an alternative yearly. PS2, Dreamcast, PS3, PS4, XBox360, XBox One, Wii, WiiU, Vita, and 3DS all allow you to copy your save files to another medium, be it USB drives, SD cards or copying to a proprietary memory card. Cloud saves on these devices are an extra not a primary backup. Nintendo is denying the use of local backups that they and everyone else have previously supported, and trying to convince you to pay for an online service to do the same thing (which isn't even a viable solution for those without excellent upload on their internet.)

Now, am I against cloud saves? No! Not at all! That's what I'm paying in for and am excited about! I've bought PSN for years for them too. But Nintendo is spinning the feature as a "safety net" to cover their own shortcomings and you're buying it. The real value of cloud saves isn't as a safety net....your own local backups should serve that purpose, even if you put them on the cloud yourself. The real value is the ability to easily move saves from one system to another, so if you're playing on someone else's hardware, or own multiple machines in multiple rooms, etc, you don't have to manually copy data off and move it from machine to machine, your saves are just "there" no matter the box. That's a good service, and it's valuable. But that's not the way they're trying to sell it for some reason.

@Yosheel It does seem that way. In that regard it's pretty disingenuous for us to compare $20 versus $60 for other consoles, because the $20 does not give you the same level of service you get from the other consoles, $35 does. So it's $35 vs $60 (often available for $50) in order to have all of your local accounts supported. But in a sense worse. Anyone can come to my house and log into my X1 or PS4 and they will have access to all of my digital games, and my online subscription. On Nintendo $20 is just for one lone user, $35 gets you access for anyone that logs into your system, BUT they do not get access to any of your digital games. That's a huge limitation. Hey, wanna try out Splatoon on my Switch? Awesome, $60 please, you'll need your own copy for your account, you can't play mine because I bought digital...if I'd bought physical it would work just fine. Huh? OTOH, Switch lets you give 7 other people their own online account on their own console which you can't do with PS/XB.

First of all, while the Direct said nothing new about NSO, they updated the website with the info they didn't tell us. What are the "Special members only deals"? Well, currently they are going to be "buy NES controllers for use on your switch while playing NES games" and "Download code for a NSO themed shirt and shoes combo in Splatoon 2". More will be revealed, when they become available. And not until then. Okay, that's not the sort of members only deals i was expecting. I was expecting member only discounts on select games, with which games changing every week or two.

For cloud saves that's disaster recovery (my save game got lost, crud, wait, it's on the cloud) and moving your saves to a new console when you transfer your profile (which will be permanently associated with your Nintendo ID). Based on this, I am assuming you'll be able to redownload digital games you bought when you move to a new console.

The app, yeah, I'm agreeing with you there. But hey, it will work with more then just Splatoon 2 O.o

As for Microsoft giving you cloud saves for free on Xbox... No they don't. If you're not a paid Gold member you have no access to any of your cloud saves. They don't delete those saves, but you have no access to them. So, try again?

Anyone hoping they’ll tie in some MyNintendo things to use Platinum coins on? I’m almost at 4000

@subpopz Agreed. Just a knee-jerk reaction when anyone says "safety net" "peace of mind" etc with cloud saves. I want t punch things whenever Nintendo says that since that's not really the main interest of cloud saves to begin with but they seem unaware of that.

"People can cheat so we disabled local saves" is only an issue because their online games refuse to store player profiles online. Nobody should care if you're scumming your Octopath saves. And the fact that they see the problem so severely they don't even let their online games use cloud saves let along backups, so your S+ rank and all your unlocked weapons are still hosed if something happens to your Switch is the best incentive to play Battlefield I've ever heard. Their solution to poorly thought out online game saves isn't to improve the online game saves....it's to cripple backups even if you're paying for them. That's actually kind of hilarious.

NEStalgia, what it could be is that since Nintendo is still fairly new at the whole "online multiplayer focused games" thing they weren't quite sure how to handle the dual requirements of "everything needs to be available offline for local multiplayer" and "saving progression data for online play in a centralized location". And in fact, this is still an issue. In fact, I can kind of understand why Nintendo's multiplayer focused titles are using Peer to Peer format instead of a centralized server. You need to be able to access your full profile both online and offline.

Diablo solves this issue by having everything saved on their server. But what if you can't access the server due to no internet connection? Well, then you don't have access to the characters on the server, and have to make new characters for offline play. Characters that are only available during offline play, as I recall.

At least I can't find any restrictions mentioned on who can be in a Family Group or use the Family Membership. And since there's no personal information like an address registered when making a Nintendo Account, they wouldn't even have any way to verify if you live under the same roof or are related.
Nintendo might as well rename the "Family Membership" to "Group Discount".

@MsJubilee

The sad thing is that their online has gotten WORSE every console since the 3DS.

The Wii U had pretty solid features, but unfortunately Nintendo decided they didn't want to support voice chat in any of their games that generation.

And now the Switch has WORSE features than the Wii U, AND they are charging for it.

So is Switch the first system ever where you lose your save files if it does? No physical backup option and forcing users to pay for a cloud alternative?

@1UP_MARIO
Yup, @ReaderRagfish, what about that? Because all seems to imply that the games and save data are tied to the online service.

@electrolite77 No, it's not. In fact, it's having online backup of save file which is fairly new in the industry. A few NES and SNES games could save your game, but if anything happened to the save file on the game all your progress was lost. Playstation and Playstation 2 both relied on small and easy to lose memory cards, which could be a bit expensive to buy. And due to the small size of the Playstation memory card, you'd need multiples of them. Or one of the more expensive "multiple page" ones. But those were prone to losing save files on occasion. PS2 had larger memory cards, but were still easy to lose. Fortunately you only needed one (usually) so could just leave it plugged into the system.

Microsoft introduced memory packs you could plug into the controller after a while, but until then if anything happened to the files on your Xbox you lost all progress in the affected games. I've also heard that you had to move the files, not just copy them, onto the memory pack. Which if true meant you still only had one copy of the save file. N64's memory pac was pricey as well, so having more then one was less likely.

In fact, until Microsoft introduced the Cloud Save feature for gold membership on the 360 (which was fairly late in the 360's life) your only option for having a backup of your console's saved games was generally "buy an expensive and easy to lose accessory".

@FaeKnight but at least there was a option. Options are always good

The technical availability of an option isn't quite the same thing as "you always have the option". How many people had more then one memory pac for their N64? I'd guess not many. PS1 memory cards were cheaper, but still pricey enough that I only ever bought 2 of them (and a 8 page version that I had to replace once because it broke after two months, and didn't bother replacing a second time). I'd needed 2 cards at least because Diablo required 9 blocks of memory for your saved game, plus another block for saving characters. If you had a decent sized game collection, you'd need multiple memory cards just to have a single save file each for your games.

PS2 was better since the memory card was so large, but it also cost enough that you probably were only going to have one. Good thing you'll likely only need one for the most part.

Switch at base also has some options you can use. They aren't good options, but they are there. You can have multiple SD cards that you assign to the Switch. If you only play physical games this may be an option for you. You know, remove SD card while playing, put in different one, and save the game again. I haven't tried this though, so don't know if it works. And it might risk corrupting the data on the SD cards. I don't know.

Or you could remove the SD card when not using your switch, that way if anything happens that could erase the save data on the Switch such as a power surge, you don't lose your save data. Don't know how effective this would be. And you wouldn't be able to use the card on a different system. But it's a potential option.

Or you can do what console gamers had been doing for decades before Cloud Saves became a thing and just not worry about it because losing your game saves isn't the end of the world. If you enjoyed the game enough to rack up X number of hours already, you'll probably enjoy playing it again anyway. Not to mention the fact that replaying a game generally means starting from scratch anyway.

@electrolite77 @1UP_MARIO @FaeKnight You don't lose your save files if your subscription ends. They'll still be on your console!

Jokes aside, I wish they'd allow us to make back ups on a Micro SD card.

Save data is not saved on the Micro SD card on the Switch! All save data is always saved on the console itself, even if you play a game from an Micro SD card.