Nintendo has made its own Discord-like chat app for the Switch 2, and it’s going to charge you for it. Once the free period is over on March 31, 2026, GameChat, and the C button that activates it, will require a Nintendo Switch Online (NSO) membership.
2025-04-095:241625www.polygon.com
Bill Trinen told us what happens when you press the C button without a subscription
So what happens if you aren’t a subscriber and press the C button? Not much, vice president of player and product experience Bill Trinen told Polygon in a recent interview.
“You would be able to find out about the NSO subscription there and get a sense of some of the functionality,” he said.
Presumably, this is how you’d learn that GameChat works a lot like Discord video chat works on PC. You can talk with your friends in handheld or docked mode via a built-in microphone and stream your gameplay to each other. There’s even a camera you can buy to overlay onto your stream, or just to chat face-to-face.
But unless you have an active NSO membership, you’ll have a whole button dedicated to nothing on your Switch 2. It doesn’t even sound like you can remap it to something else. It will just be a reminder of the annual $19.99 fee you may or may not be handing to Nintendo every year (or $49.99 for the Expansion Pack).
Trinen says the C button has a price tag because GameChat is “part of the overall platform experience” and that “NSO really is a critical piece of the Nintendo Switch 2 experience.” He listed off some of the new Switch 2-exclusive benefits, like access to old GameCube games and free upgrades to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.
That subscription fee will be on top of a console that’s already going to cost you $449.99 — or possibly more if U.S. President’s Trump’s tariffs prompt Nintendo to increase it. We won’t know if GameChat will prove to be worth it until the Switch 2 releases in June.
Correction (April 8): A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the frequency of Nintendo Switch Online’s fees. It has been updated to reflect NSO’s annual subscription fees.
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Comments
By cluckindan 2025-04-096:042 reply The entire launch feels like a cash grab. $80 for game downloads?
By theshrike79 2025-04-096:243 reply The digital edition of Baldur's Gate 3 is 80€, nothing has changed.
More like Nintendo has caught up to the pricing of other companies.
By crtasm 2025-04-0919:39 It's always been €60 on steam (and often discounted to €48)
I still remeber getting games at 300 escudos, back in the 1980s.
Direct conversion to euros would be about 1.50 €, adding the inflaction to 2025, would be about 10 € if being generous.
Playstation 2 titles were already quite expensive hence why so many gamers started only buying 2nd hand, or getting them at local libraries, workarounds that digital distribution has killed.
What will change is that studios will keep getting closed, because most people cannot afford more than one or two games a year at that price level.
By theshrike79 2025-04-099:27 Games are suffering with the same issues as movies: the missing middle.
There are indie games with 1-5 devs doing it on a shoestring budget. Sometimes they hit big, sometimes they still need a day job. These can be sold for any price, since any income is still income.
Then there are the AAAAA games with 500 people making it on a $100M+ budget. And these MUST make money or they can bankrupt the whole studio. Some are massive franchises (CoD, GTA) and can ask any price and people will STILL preorder the most expensive set.
But there are very very few if any mid-price games. Some Paradox strategy games perhaps?
By fortyseven 2025-04-096:54 Well that's okay, then!
By Woshiwuja 2025-04-096:07 [dead]
The Switch does have alternative Open Source firmware: https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/Atmosphere
It's a set of hooks on top of the Nintendo's firmware. It's a jailbreak, not an alternative.
All firmware is "a set of hooks" if we're being reductive. Regardless, the Switch also has an alternative bootloader that you can use to run "real" CFW like Linux and Android so it's kinda a moot point.
By seba_dos1 2025-04-0920:20 I'm not "being reductive", it's what it aims to be.
Of course, only jailbroken Switches can run either of these things.
By politelemon 2025-04-097:54 Looking at Nintendo's recent behaviour, it is only viable as long as they haven't sent a legalesque threat to the developers. Legal usage has not been a deterrent to the threats they send out, because they've been successful at shutting other projects down.
The EU should work on building things and not trying to regulate things to death.
By benoau 2025-04-096:14 How can the EU work on "building things" if the companies with the most resources and the greatest capacity for "building things" are actually making copycat software propped up with policies that exclude competition?
By poisonborz 2025-04-096:18 EU companies should work on building things. EU government is there to regulate (and encourage via regulation).
By josephcsible 2025-04-096:11 I'm all for weakening regulations, but not when doing so would strengthen the regulation of copyright.
By orionblastar 2025-04-095:383 reply I hope they have a Discord app, Discord allows you to chat for free and all the PC Gamers use it.
By christkv 2025-04-095:46 I doubt it. Kids use the ipad with discord to chat while playing on the current switch
By pixxel 2025-04-096:40 [dead]
By darthrupert 2025-04-096:121 reply [flagged]
By theshrike79 2025-04-096:252 reply What do "all pc gamers" use to communicate then? Teamspeak? Ventrilo?
By fhk 2025-04-096:43 Webex
By darthrupert 2025-04-097:09 Communicate? With whom? Why?
Stop gatekeeping.
