Switch Joy-Con Straps
Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo Life

Cast your mind back to when you first opened your shiny new Nintendo Switch.

After removing the individually wrapped controllers and clipping them onto the console itself, you delved into the box's second layer of goodies to find the dock, the power cable... and a couple of plastic stick things.

You likely pulled them from their little pouches and quickly understood that these were the Switch equivalent of the Wiimote straps; the Joy-Con's design necessitated a separate little 'rail' that the controllers clip into.

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And if you're anything like us, you promptly clipped them to the Joy-Con the wrong way round and then had a nightmare trying to prise the things off. Once you finally managed to separate the poorly designed clips, you returned them to the box and never touched them again, irritated that you might have damaged your shiny new console mere moments after unpacking it.

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Be mindful — Image: Nintendo Life

Images allegedly showing the new Joy-Con for Switch 2 seem to align with previous reports that they attach to the console magnetically, suggesting that perhaps we'll soon be seeing magnetic variants of the Joy-Con Strap... although assuming they're electromagnets, that would mean anything they attach to would need current to make them 'stick', which complicates things. Let's not worry about that for the moment, but it has got us wondering how many people actually used these things in the first place.

They're hangovers from the Wii days, of course, when motion controls were new and no television was safe from some eejit impaling a controller through the screen during a particularly vigorous Wii Tennis match. We weren't inclined to wear them then, even with all the health and safety warnings Nintendo took care to show us, so after accidentally attaching them the wrong way and banishing the Switch variants to the box immediately, it makes us wonder how much cash Nintendo might have saved by not including two of these with every Switch sold, plus the untold millions of extra Joy-Con it's shifted over the last seven years.

No, it probably doesn't cost Nintendo a huge amount in R&D, tooling, and materials to produce Joy-Con Straps, but considering how few people actually use these things, that's an awful lot of wasted plastic and not a small amount of money. Could that cash not have been funnelled into developing, say, a new Rhythm Heaven for Switch? Is avoiding lawsuits from people who accidentally lobbed Joy-Con at their priceless Ming vases worth saddling the rest of us with useless plastic?

Hey, maybe we've got this entirely wrong, though. Are you all diligently attaching your Nintendo Joy-Con Rail Doohickey Wotsits™ every time you slide the controller off your Switch? Let us know in the poll below, and then hit the comments to ponder what other cool things Nintendo could have done with all that plastic.

Do you use the Joy-Con Straps when detaching your controllers from your Switch?

Okay, back to waiting for Switch 2 news, innit.

Team Nintendo Life waiting for a Switch 2 announcement
Image: Paramount Pictures