The Nintendo Switch won’t have any form of family sharing between consoles

Just in case you were wondering

There’s a lot of hubbub in the digital era regarding sharing games. Digital often features more drawbacks than positives, so things like family sharing on modern consoles, where you can download games to several systems, adds to the allure of forgoing physical media. But according to a recent Switch Q&A, Nintendo isn’t going to offer anything like that at launch.

The exact question that was posed was if someone was to buy a second Switch for his kids, if they’d be able to play a digital game on both, to which Nintendo entertainment planning manager Shinya Takahashi explained: “Currently we don’t have a system like that in place for Nintendo Switch. But we haven’t made any final decisions about how we would approach that going forward in the future, so unfortunately I can’t provide any concrete answer for you right now.” So you’re saying there’s a chance!? Maybe. But for now, don’t count on it.

While the response some of you who haven’t enjoyed family sharing features are preparing right now is probably something like “why would Nintendo give you stuff for free?” it’s a little more involved than that. Say you have two consoles, and you buy a cart for a game. You can swap that cart to either one, no problem. But if you go digital, you evidently can’t swap them on the Switch — whereas other consoles allow it by authenticating your PSN, Steam, or Xbox Live account.

It’s just a little extra barrier to entry for digital, which is something platform holders don’t want as more and more people are going that route.

Nintendo NY [YouTube]