Topic: Switch online family is complicated

Let me start by saying I am not the most gamer literate person by any means i sporadically got to play a few mins here and there of games growing up and with my kids we've always been a bit behind of the newest thing. We all got our own switches in recent years and we've stuck mostly to physical copies of games but we have bought a few digital and the Mario Kart expansion pack was one of the first things we got. But it had been hugely frustrating with the digital stuff that we can only access it from one profile and that if my son is playing a digital game on his switch I can't play it on my switch. Finding any info on how having the family membership works beyond here's what's included is insane but we took the plunge anyways reading the up to 8 users and such thinking maybe we'd be able to access games through different users since it was allowed 8 users and maybe that even meant we could play online together, like we've been bummed that star dew valley is only available for two person splitscreen on switch our hope was to be able to tie in all three of us playing together via online or a combo of online and local but no dice. I'm seriously failing to see the point of the family membership if still online 1 person can utilize it at a time. Am I juat clueless or what? If so any helpful advice would be more than welcome

Yeah, someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain everything is one game per system, outside of games specifically on the NSO service. Maybe some specific games have exceptions but those exceptions are likely not first party Nintendo games.

Its required for online gaming, it has retro games, the Expansion Pass has more retro games and a handful of DLC, a couple of other things...that's about it.

@kkslider5552000 so getting the family vs the individual is a rip off then if it doesn't make it so the whole family can utilize it at once?

@Agoug The family plan is the cheaper way to go if you want to get Nintendo Switch Online(NSO) online gaming access to multiple switch users or switch consoles. As you've seen, when you buy a single subscription to NSO, access is restricted to the Nintendo account/Switch User that bought the sub. It doesn't grant game ownership to be shared across multiple consoles+switch users.

Regarding digital games, ownership is tied to the nintendo account that bought it. Game ownership is not granted to share out to family members on different consoles. (however, other switch users on your console can access the game, if you're not playing it)

The switch ecosystem isn't very family friendly in that respect - it blocks sharing games. Sure, you can lend a cartridge to a family member, but that one-game-copy cannot be played by multiple switch user profiles or multiple switch consoles at the same time. So, having multiple switches gets expensive if you want each family member's console to have their own copy of the game.

I think you might confusing the online membership with buying a game digitally. A single online membership covers all the members of a family group for the Nintendo Switch Online benefits, like playing online, the retro console apps, etc. However, when you buy a game from the eShop it is solely tied to the account that bought it and acts like a single copy, hence being unable to play it when that account is playing something else.

There's one more subtlety to all this that nobody's mentioned and that's that each account has a primary console, where any games that they have installed from their own account can be played by any other user.

So, if you've got a bunch of people sharing a single Switch, that's great. It's everyone's primary console, so everyone else can play everyone else's games.

If you've got two people with two Switches, that's also great. Both users can play each others games if they make their switch the other user's primary console. They just can't play the same game online at the same time unless they've both got their own copy.

Once you add a third user, a third console, or more, it gets complicated though and you've got to think carefully about which users are going to be able to play which games on which consoles.

This is best asked of Nintendo Support since they are the ultimate support that these NSO accounts limits are to be asked and what we say could be different from what Nintendo interprets the same quesitons.