Ever since its debut to the game-playing community in March, the Nintendo Switch has been seen ascendancy among videogame platforms thanks to its unique hybrid nature as both a home console and portable device. Such has been the success of this new foray by Nintendo that the Switch has never found itself lacking in third-party support. Even the Japanese game maker has been inspired to get a bit more daring by encouraging its game developers to try for more mature titles. All this does not mean that the platform has no faults at all. And indeed, it is to answer some wishes by players that Nintendo has put forth its latest firmware update.

Half-minute video recording

A number of nifty features have been made available for Switch owners after Nintendo released the 4.0.0 firmware update for their hot-selling gaming platform. At last gamers can now perform with the switch what some other platforms have long developed: the ability to transfer both user profiles and save data to another console, especially for game titles that have versions across multiple platforms. There is also a new video capture function that enables players to record in-game footage for uploading online, though it only works for a handful of Switch games for now.

That last descriptor is quite literal, in fact. The online support website for Nintendo has a note dated Wednesday, October 18, stating that the new video capture feature added to the platform by the firmware update is compatible thus far with four games, all Nintendo first-party titles.

They are “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,” “Mario Kart 8 Deluxe,” “ARMS,” and “Splatoon 2.” Furthermore, the duration of captured footage has a maximum time of only 30 seconds. Once the recording is saved on the Switch image album, they can be edited or trimmed by a small tool suite and shared on only two social media venues: Twitter and Facebook.

One-time data transfer

The other significant add-on to the Switch from Nintendo’s 4.0.0 firmware is the long-awaited game profile and save data transfer option. But even here what gamers finally got is a little bit lacking from what they were truly expecting. The problem is that once the owner has electronically transferred his game profile and saved data to a destination console, the Switch automatically wipes its copy of the profile and saves from its memories.

As a result, the transferred information in the other console becomes the only copy.

Switch owners have felt let down by the limitations of the new firmware features for their gaming platform. This is doubly so for the data transfer as they had been looking for a way to save backup copies of their gaming information most of all. It looks like Nintendo still has some unsatisfied issues left to address.