Its been a year since the launch of the Nintendo Switch and its Online Service remains incomplete. Although Switch players have had no problem going online and engaging with other players worldwide, the console's online infrastructure is still missing key features, especially its monthly subscription plan thanks to a delay. Fortunately, Nintendo revealed in a tweet that the complete online experience will become available sometime during the month of September 2018.
One of many surprising announcements
The announcement was made the same day that Nintendo held its earnings briefing in which the company revealed other good news for the Nintendo Switch. During the briefing, Nintendo revealed that the Nintendo Switch had outsold the Wii U by passing 14 million units since March 2017.
Software sales for the console were also high. The standout among them was "Super Mario Odyssey" with over 9 million copies sold worldwide within a mere 2 months. That puts "Mario Kart 8" in second place at 7.3 million sales followed by "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" at 6.7 million.
Competing with PSN and XBL
As previously revealed, Nintendo's new online service is meant to adopt a monetary scheme much like those of its competitors Sony and Microsoft. Similar to PSN and Xbox Live, the Nintendo online service will have a paywall that costs $3.99 per month, $7.99 for 3 months or $19.99 per year to climb over. Also like its competitors, the Nintendo online service will offer bonus content to its subscribers including eShop deals and a selection of classic Nintendo games to play.
There are already problems
However, the online service is not without its flaws. Particularly, the voice chat component of the service has been relegated to a mobile app that can only be downloaded, installed and run on a smartphone, forcing users to have to use both devices together.
This setup has been made even more cumbersome in games like "Splatoon 2" which forced players to buy an adaptor that connects the console with the smartphone, then use the latter to communicate with other players during online multiplayer on the former.
Hopefully Nintendo will solve this conundrum before launch by rolling out a more conventional voice chat feature but so far the company seems confident about it and could stay the course. This was evident when the company rolled out a patch for the app that fixed some issues rather than scrapping it.