Nintendo is so proud of the feature that it even included a little C button right on your Joy-Con (which was a point of excited speculation before the reveal) so you can jump into Game Chat whenever you like.
Unfortunately, it also tried to bury the fact that this Game Chat feature will actually require a Nintendo Switch Online subscription once the free trial period ends on March 31, 2026.
Now, you may be wondering what the button does if you don’t have a subscription? Thankfully, Nintendo’s vice president of player and product experience, Bill Trinen, was interviewed by Polygon on that very same topic. Trinen explains that the button will let you “find out about the NSO subscription there and get a sense of some of the functionality.” It’s basically a button that asks you to pay up.
It’s basically a button that asks you to pay up
We’ve gotten to the point where button functions are microtransactions…
This is why I emulate games and just use Linux
I don’t have a Switch 2 and am not interested in getting one, but I do know rage-bait articles about non-issues. I can’t understand someone throwing a tantrum because there’s a button on their controller that they don’t need. Just ignore it?
Hey, I bought a car that has a “Bluelink+” option to talk to their support people. It’s a subscription service which I don’t pay for. It doesn’t harm me in the least that the button is there and I don’t use it. I don’t even mind that the ads for the car mention that it’s a feature. It would be weird if it did upset me.
The rational thing to do is to allow binding that key to some other function, but that wouldn’t be miserable for the users so they won’t allow that
It’s the same as with my TV remote there’s 4 buttons reserved for full-screen advertisements for shitty streaming services. At very least those buttons could do nothing when someone accidentally hits it, if rebinding is somehow too fucking difficult
But you can rebind it.
System settings -> Accessibility -> Button mapping.
Get out of here with your facts and rational thought, if Nintendo does something it’s automatically uniquely bad.
Especially because video games are theMOST IMPORTANT METRIC of a FUNCTIONAL SOCIETY
I have had a switch 2 for over a year, I have yet to press the C button once.
I did not know this button existed until this post.
I’ve pressed it a couple times.
By accident of course
I bought the Switch 2 at launch with the intent to hack it, so it sits in my closet collecting dust since I’m still enjoying playing everything (including Dusklite) on my hacked Switch 1