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.
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 $19.99 you may or may not be handing to Nintendo every year.
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.
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It just seems like every thing they tell us about the Switch 2 it gets to be a worse and worse investment. The price point of the console and the games are so high that I am not even considering buying Nintendo.
What is it about this new console that's better than any other consoles? Why would anyone buy the S2 if the Steam deck is an option, for instance? Consumers can buy three or four great games on a PC/Steam deck for the cost of one Nintendo S2 game, and Nintendo games nearly never go on sale.
It's almost like Nintendo knows they are due for a dud of a console and have just decided to punt on this one.
They seem to either knock it out of the park and have the best sales of the generation (NES, SNES, Wii, Switch, all of the handhelds) or they fail miserably and end up in last (N64, GameCube, WiiU).
cries in N64 nostalgia