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Coil

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#2066155 1-Aug-2018 10:44

MurrayM:

So how does the online work for the Switch? I think I read that it was pay only? And if I buy games digitally, are they locked to my particular Switch or to my account (I think that was a problem with Wii digital games, in that they were locked to the console rather than the account that bought them, so if your Wii died you lost all your digital games).

I have played fort on my mates one and it seems to be free and run fine.
Epic provide the match making and servers so I do not think that there is any online subscription required by Nintendo.

SpartanVXL

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#2066158 1-Aug-2018 10:50

It's free till September from memory. Same thing as PS Plus or Xbox Gold subscription, you get a bunch of extra goodies but the main thing is multiplayer.

The plus side is its something like $3 usd so 5 bucks a month which is nibbles compared to the other two.

I am however guessing that free to play games like fortnite will be exempt from this just like they are on PS/Xbox

EDIT: With digital games, they are tied to the account you purchased them with. They remain on the Switch which is marked as your primary device and anyone logged in to it can play the game. To move the games you have to de-activate the old device and activate the new one to move games, although it'll stop you from playing them on the old one. Save data also can't be transferred at all for now although I'm guessing they might make that available through the sub like sony/ms does with cloud saves.

Batwing

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#2066163 1-Aug-2018 10:57

There's been some complaints that multiplayer for some games us peer to peer and suffers connection issues and lag therefore. Yes it's free for now but paid in future.

As far as I know digital purchases are per account. There are no save backups or synchronisation though so you can lose all progress.

MurrayM

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#2066228 1-Aug-2018 11:52

Thanks for the info guys!

I don't think I'd bother with a paid subscription, mainly because I'm not really interested in multi-player games (I suck at anything that requires running around shooting people or racing against other players), and it looks like the free games will all be old NES and SNES games which don't interest me (I've got other ways of playing those games if I really wanted to). The cloud backup of game saves might however be useful.

Are all physical games also available as downloads and are downloaded games cheaper than physical copies? I assume there are some small games that are download-only?

SpartanVXL

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#2066238 1-Aug-2018 12:10

I would think most physical games are available as digital only, although I can't confirm. You're right in that some games are digital only, especially on release until they start shipping the cartridges.

Price gets a bit tricky. Because the Switch is region free, you'll find that a lot of overseas online shops will be cheaper than local for physical (and the digital Nintendo eShop which is set to NZD). nzgameshop is a decent example of this, they ship their stuff from the UK for generally $20~+ less than retail here for new games. It's either that or you buy second hand catridges off trademe etc.

The only benefit for price from the eShop is that you get a 5% credit back from purchases in the form of points to spend on later purchases. You also get points from brand new physical games but it's only 1% of the value of the game on the eShop.

Side benefit: Physical games take almost no space on storage as all data is on the cartridge. If you have a lot of digital games you might need a big sd card to keep them all.

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