Switch and Mario Kart
Image: Damien McFerran / Nintendo Life

The Switch may be approaching its 5th Birthday, but it's still the best-selling game console on the market at present; there'll no doubt be a lot of new owners and systems going online this Holiday season, too. When that happens, of course, we can often see some server issues that can impact eShop access and account creation.

Nintendo is eager to warn new Switch owners, we suspect especially parents giving them to children, to set it up ahead of the big day. Nintendo's Japanese customer service account has put the word out (thanks, Siliconera), and we suspect regional accounts will promote a similar message in the coming days.

This weekend, we are expecting a concentrated access on the Nintendo Account server, and it may cause things like being unable to immediately create Nintendo Accounts.

We recommend people who plan to use the Nintendo Switch Family feature for the first time to create their own [accounts] beforehand.

We'd suggest this should also apply to pre-downloading eShop games, too.

Update: Nintendo of America has tweeted out a handy link to help people with setup.

Hopefully 25th December will pass with Nintendo's servers holding up, but they did have some issues in 2020 so it's worth preparing ahead of time just in case. If you're wondering what you need to do with a brand new Switch, check out our guide below:

[source siliconera.com]