A feature that many users will take for granted, and one that we expect is completely overlooked by some, the Nintendo Switch News section is a handy little tool for gamers who like to keep up to date with their favourite games. Not unlike Nintendo Life (a pretty stellar news provider, or so we've heard), this icon on the Switch's homepage takes you to a selection of stories and updates about your favourite games, and even provides the occasional in-game bonus.
We often talk about the development of games themselves, but the relatively low-key features built in to a console at launch can often go under the radar. Changing this, the official Japanese Nintendo website has uploaded a post sharing some details on how the news service was created.
Interestingly, the author of the article Yuusuke Inoue (who works in Science and Engineering at Nintendo), states that the development process took almost a whole year to complete, with a team of 4-5 staff members on board. The process faced many challenges along the way including the differences in feedback from Japanese and Western audiences; the development team would keep suggesting new ideas until they found something that could satisfy everyone.
Do you use the news channel functionality on your Switch? Are you happy that it was included as a feature on the console? We'd love to read your thoughts in the comments below.
[source nintendo.co.jp]
Comments 114
I can't wait for the Switch Everybody Votes Channel in 2025!
Seriously though, I wish you could turn off the channel for some accounts. While I like having access to the Japanese eShop through the Japanese account I set up, I have no use for a news channel where I can't understand a word of what's written.
Too bad it got destroyed with my Japanese account, actually thought it was fun to scroll through before hand.
It's neat that we get news almost immediately and not delayed.
I guess now we know why the switch is getting so little feature updates, still in development
Sounds like a bit of a waste of a year but hey, they get paid so I'm sure they can't complain. I never touch the news button. If I had the option to remove it completely, I'd probably do so.
I enjoy checking it every now and then but i wish there was the option to filter it to only your own region, once you create separate accounts for Europe/Japan/US you get all three coming through on the news channel, with no way to only see just one again.
"With a team of 4-5 people"
Jeez, that's some commitment. They must have 1 person locked in a basement working on Virtual Console and another person working on a web browser.
Switch needs these updates to celebrate 1st Anniversary on next week :
1. Folders to organize game icons.
2. Music for E-Shop menu.
3. More themes for Switch interface menu.
4. Play History as detail as 3DS.
5. Disable News Channel.
I usually check it out once a day. Find the feature to be very handy. Especially after directs as they post all the trailers their an hour after it happened
Based on that we might get cloud saves by 2031!!!
I’m hoping when Nintendo launches its online service we will see a major redesign and improvement on the switch. Eshop needs to be better organised and online play needs to be easier. Can’t wait to see what they have lined up for it though. I’m sure it will be value for money
I like it but I wish when you clicked on an individual game's channel you could then select some of the news stories it shows there. I mean what is the point of showing previous stories if you can't access them? Apart from that it is cool.
Also I hope that whatever updates happen to the UI it is not at the expense of the speed and simplicity the Switch UI already has as it is great!
This just shows how bad nintendo is at online... anything that's not a game they struggle with horribly... I have no faith in online this September... I hope I'm wrong but damn... this is just sad. I'm amazed they got mii verse right, I loved that thing.
No wonder they had to delay the online service haha
So, wireless headset support in 2054 on Switch-u-pro-championship-edition-2?
cya
Raziel-chan
I like the news channel is a great little feature that lets you keep up to date with everything Nintendo.
@ieatdragonz What do you mean it got destroyed? I have a Japanese and US account and my news is fine.
News section is not even good. I don't think it is important so I don't care, but it is quite an useless mess, I never used wishlist before but now on Switch I have started to put games in my wishlist after I tried the news section and saw how useless and dispersive it is. Thinking that it took almost one year to create it is unbelievable, it makes me sad... How can Nintendo create such beautiful games, such fantastic consoles, and then struggle so much with trivial things like that??? It's paradoxical O_O
Well I'm thankful it is not something really necessary, no matter if it's bad I don't care that much about it anyway
But still it is really unbelievable lol
@Rika_Yoshitake that’s why Nintendo partnered with someone that has an idea what they are doing for the online service, so it will probably be OK if Nintendo just lets them do their thing.
That said I don’t think I would openly admit that news section took 5 people a year to make.....
The search function needs to be handled better. I saw Nintendo Minute highlight their own news channel on the News app on Switch but for the life of me, I cannot find it. I try to search for it, nothing comes up. Yet I've seen screens posted on the internet of pics of the channel so I know it exists. But unless things show up on the home page of my news app, it seems I can't find it.
I'm quite fond of it. Nice to get snapshots of what is going on or the new game right there in a non intrusive way.
Well if it took them a year for this tiny little feature, it's no wonder the Switch is still a lackluster device with dozens of big features missing.
@ieatdragonz I was going to say the exact same thing. Ever since I created a Japanese account on my Switch, my News Feed is littered with nothing but stories in Japanese. I've never found one news item there that's in English loooooooooooooool.
I personally really like the news channel, specially when they put funny comments within the news, or share game dev details like the recent Mario Odyssey concept art.
I enjoy the news feed and the articles are great (miles ahead of the trash they offered on Wii U and 3DS).
However, it took 4-5 man years of work to make? Typical Nintendo. You can't even search for articles or search for channels. And, if you go to the channel list and click a channel, you can't even click on the articles! Sigh
There's no way this should've taken 4-5 people a year to make. It's very disheartening when I think of the other things we desperately need on the Switch and are overdue, and would be more complicated than a "news channel" (while realistically not really being "complicated")
I take a look at the news feed almost every time I boot up my Switch. Surprised how long it took to implement it though
As already said, interesting at first but once I created a Japanese account its just inundated with Japanese stories. How hard would it be to just put an option in each account to say whether you want news or not?
Or at least an option to filter between accounts.
Maybe that's why their online service is taking so long. They got 5 people working on it lol.
@alasdair91 There was no news feed on the 3DS, breh. I call #FakeNews on that one.
@shani A lackluster device that is still the best selling gaming hardware for months.
Imagine when superfluous features come out to eat the Switch's battery. It will surpass the Wii or maybe even the DS in sales.
The moment I read the headline, I knew the comments section would be a crapshow full of people who aren't software developers criticizing Nintendo. Designing and polishing something takes time.
As a software developer myself, I am not at all surprised it took 4-5 people this long to complete. Most people very much underestimate how much there can be behind an aparently simple piece of software.
Just like how people seem to think it would be easy to bring VC to the Switch. I would be very surprised if it actually were easy and I would really like to see the code behind it.
@EasyDaRon it seems that way but think there's probably a bunch of stuff behind the scenes, a UI to create new stories, some sort of API to feed stories out to other channels, a database to store everything, some cloud based setup that can serve millions of users. Plus I guess they aren't using a common well known framework to build this. Not even considering the inevitable redesigns that came from feedback. I'm a software engineer and it's surprising how little small team actually does in a year when you look back on it. It's a tough job.
never really look at it, except when there has been a direct to look at the game trailers.
@alasdair91 How did you get to "years" if the news states "almost a year"?
And, like I just wrote in a different comment, don't underestimate the amount of work needed for something like that.
@GC-161 You mean superflous features like gaming on the go?
My Switch's battery has never run out of power so far...
What's superflous and what's not is highly subjective.
But having a browser and video services on a gaming device should be a no-brainer nowadays.
Anyone who is interested in games watches videos about them and reads wikis, walkthroughs or other info sites about them.
Why keep such a crucial feature away from the Switch? Makes no sense.
Especially since it's a tablet that could be so much more than just a gaming device. Holding the Switch's potential back artificially is really stupid of Nintendo if you ask me. It would be an additional selling point if you could use for everything else as well.
@GC-161 The 3DS and Wii U had a news feature where you could opt-in to news from Nintendo and sale announcements.
@kirgo It's 4-5 man years. That's 1 year of real time with 4 to 5 people spending that year working on the same thing.
@alasdai91 I wanna see some receipts on that being a feature on the 3DS.
@shani I mean superfluous features that my phone already covers on the go. Youtube, Netflix, Hulu (emulators) Etc.
Same as everyone above, it was a neat little feed, but after I added my Japanese eShop account 96% of the content in the feed is Japanese, which is pretty frustrating.
@Galenmereth "Software takes time. Good software takes longer."
No it doesn't, any feature, no matter the scale and complexity, can be designed and completed within 100 man-hours(TM) or less if a Team Effort(TM) is made and significant paperwor.....err...communication is maintained, and everything is broken into manageable milestones and goals.
Sincerely,
Every Project Manager Ever.
Well that's just embarassing
I usually check it out but usually it's a total waste of my time. Typically the articles are worthless advertisements for most game and provide very little for the owners of these games. For example, the Super Mario Odyssey "news" is almost always worthless. It usually doesn't offer anything to the people who own and play the game. But occasionally there are actual good news on there that is helpful or interesting. I thought the video update for Octopath was terrific. I think the Zelda news is usually good. Th recent shortcut hints for Mario Kart are great, and the Splatoon ones are hit or miss. Sometimes the Splatoon ones introduce new weapons or levels but sometimes it's useless garbage.
@GC-161 Well by that logic your phone is superflous because your PC/Laptop already covers all its features.
Who cares about what your phone does? We're talking about the Switch. I don't want to go get my smartphone with that tiny screen every time I need to read/watch something during gaming. That would disrupt the whole gaming flow. And it's really unnecessary because the Switch could easily handle that.
I just want to press home, open the browser/video app, get the info I need, press home twice and continue playing. Which works flawless on Wii U by the way.
And when the Switch has a browser and youtube, why not go ahead and add Netflix etc. as well? Whenever I take a break from gaming - e.g. to eat something - I could just hit home, open Netflix, watch an episode while eating and then get back into the game without the whole flow getting disrupted.
You can't do that with your phone because it doesn't play Switch games and usually smartphones are not connected to an HDMI dock all the time.
So it's really strange to me how anyone would prefer using their phone while playing a game.
@shani Hey, breh... cool it with the wall of text. I'm on my phone and there is no way Imma gonna read all that Cuz I'M ON THE GO.
Speaking of portability... good luck stuffing your PC or even a laptop in yer pocket.
Comments never fail to entertain, lol
Love the idea of it, but I have a Japanese account on my Switch for the odd Japan-only eShop game, and my news feed is flooded with stuff from NCL. If they were to give us the option to turn off notifications entirely for a single account, that would be great. Subscribing to the English Mario Odyssey feed, for example, still gives you the Japanese updates.
I like it, I just wish I wouldn’t have made a Japanese account as well for the Sonic Forces demo. Can’t get rid of Japanese news!
it would be useful if there was user created content too - like on PSN or Live (or even Miiverse). As it is, I just ignore it
What you see with the news channel is only 1/5 of the whole. Content management, language and localization, distribution, subscription and user preference, publishing and verification all need to be taken care off on the back end. Those 4 or 5 people where worked to the bone
@Anti-Matter yeah, the dead silent, lifeless eshop makes me nuts. I too hope they bring back the music. Come on Nintendo, bring dat beat back!
Essentially a blog program, and it's painfully unfinished to boot.
A whole year just to create a minimalist ripoff version of a Windows 8/10 feature? I would say that was a colossal waste of those workers' time. Not their fault either, stupid executive decisions are what brought this about...
It's just mind-bogglingly amazing how the Wii's first year apps completely puts the Switch's to absolute shame. Makes me appreciate what came before a lot more!
I'm not educated on programming or development of software. I would assume that a lot more goes into what we are seeing than some are assuming
It is always a joy to see the little blur blur (I'm not talking golden rings here) light up to see what's new.
I use the news channel almost everytime I get on my Switch. It's great to keep up with games that are out and games that are coming.
That’s a little sad considering how lacking it is in seemingly basic functionality. There is no way to view posts from a single channel and there is no means of searching or sorting the list of available channels. I do like the feature, though. It just needs more work.
I check the news channel every time the blue indicator appears (which is several times a day). A lot of the content is useless to me, as well, but I still enjoy it.
Just a suggestion, though: For all those with ideas that could make the service better, why don't you send those ideas to Nintendo? Then maybe some of them will eventually get implemented.
I adore the news channel, and visit it a few times a week! It's the kind of feature that I wouldn't have thought of, but is charming and offers that same sense of a connected virtual world that the Wii U's home page or the Spla2n plaza presents. The writing for articles is often quite engaging as well.
I check the News Channel out every day. Its actually pretty darn handy next to the Eshop itself. 4-5 people over the course of a year is really bad though. Nintendo have the money and the people. Why didn't they just up the number to 10 or something? COuld have shaved a couple of months off by a huge margin.
I doubt the News Channel team was completely separate from the rest of the OS team, so it must all be an estimate. But people need to remember it's not a team of 4-5 coders, its 4-5 staff. That includes designers, QA, consumer research, managers as well as software developers.
Y’all are so annoying with wanting to disable the news section. Go cry about it to your mommies lol
I'm kinda turned off by it because I'd rather have a web browser where I can just login to NintendoLife and get my news in a better way. I like that each game has their own channel so that you can be on top of game updates, but having had Miiverse before, this just feels like that but without the fun.
Like others my main complaint is my Japanese account hogging my entire news feed. Also, I’d Love to see more news updates directly from devs concerning patch notes and other details, and tips. Not just ads for new content. I guess some stay too busy to fully utilize the news on Switch.
Eh I prefer NintendoLife. They're the only peeps who talk about rumours and stability updates.
They spent a year developing an ad channel; did they spend as much time on the Switch's eShop? Because...it's kind of a user-unfriendly eyesore.
I like the News channel. Reading about tidbits, sales and new game releases is enjoyable to me, but it would be nice if the system could filter out news about games you’re not interested in.
Speaking of the OS, I really wish they would add music to the eShop, it feels so lifeless right now in my opinion.
Give me miiverse back! It was great way to communicate to devs and get news.
That News Channel is completely useless. Providing "news" that's months old about stuff I always already know about. I have never once found anything useful about it. And the interface is cluttered and ugly and hard to take in at a glance. Everything about it is terrible; they should be ashamed it took them a year to create something so pointless.
I love this feature! Glad it's included! The little bonuses is BotW and ARMS are greatly appreciated!
I miss miiverse and vote channel on Wii. It was great.
No offense to the news channel, but it took a year with 4-5 people to build this! I would be fired from my job and I manage projects almost eerily similar to what they did and I normally use myself and one other resource and take a month or less. Is the OS impossible to code for?
And it punishes you for going multi-region. I’m sure that was the finishing touch
I checked it out but can’t read Japanese
What a waste of resources! The news channel is absolutely awful. I wish I could disable all the notification lights.
This just shows how inexperience of their coding team. The signs that the rejection of a partnership with Cyanogen definitely show. Nintendo is insanely green when it comes to the android OS. The fact that the eShop is worse then the one that launched with the 3DS and Wii just hammers that home. They also cannot figure out how to run a simple chat app in the background that the original Xbox could run 20 years ago. They need to hire people with experience and partner with Discord to easily fix this issue. OS updates are also taking far too long and the network is taking ages longer then it should. I love the minimalism of the OS, but let's be honest, Minimalist does not mean less options. The OS is not very robust in the way titles are shown and handled. We need more options for everything and they also need to stop forcing whatever garbage ToS they are onto the apps. Netflix makes an app for everything and was making one for Switch, they were even rumored to have given one to Nintendo for approval. Then out of nowhere the story changed and most likely no app will come.
TL;DR: Nintendo, please get more experienced Android coders, partner with Discord to get a usable chat experience, update the OS more often, get the network up and running, and push the OS out of the featureless alpha/beta that it currently resides.
5 people working for a year never thought to give an option to separate user accounts and regions?
Personally I like that feature, it's pretty handy to check out any news on games you play
I don't really care for the News channel. Also I don’t like the Switch’s UI it is just to bland / simple and cheap looking in my own opinion, compared to the Ps4, xbox one, and even the Wii U has a better looking UI compared to the Switch even though it might be a little slow. Hopefully they will redo the UI when they release the online.
I like the news channel but more features and some apps could go a long way. Looking forward to a more robust online service later this year.
I appreciate the news channel and enjoy the cute articles they post. I use it way more than miiverse or xbox news.
Talking up a totally useless feature. Yep news channel is totally useless. What a laugh it took a team a year to make lol
@GC-161 the 3ds does have a news feed. Notifications, and before they nuked it Swapnote
Nintendo now allows user to review games on their Switch. Nintendo Life missed the news as usual.
However, Nintendo only allows you to review the best games on Switch. This way none of the cr*p games get insulted and all the reviews will be positive. Way to go Nintendo!
Almost a year? Honestly that sounds totally reasonable if they were making it completely from scratch, but that just begs the question of why they would work like that. You don't have to reinvent everything every time.
@Daruncic Swapnote wasn't a "news feed".
I guess by "news feed" on the 3DS you guys mean the brief notifications you would get about new games being available on eShop?
C'mon son.
Virtual Console in 20 years then.
Demonstrative of Japanese 'productivity'.
I find it perfectly fine and useful.
People dismissing the work of the developers as just a bunch of text with links and images haven’t got the remotest idea what it really takes to bring that to life. It’s not the technical aspect of it but the creative process what takes its time.
It’s very funny how people ridicule and dismiss things when they don’t know a bit how those things came to be. It shows exactly how most people possess the same empathy as a stone.
I don't understand the point of the news channel at all. Never have I learned anything new by checking it, I always hear about things quicker via all the different sources on the internet.
@Kirgo Does the article state they were on the feature full time, or did they simply have 4-5 people working it over a 12 month span while doing other things. 4-5 man years seems nuts, but if the same staff were also working on the eShop and the supporting infrastructure then it seems like a realitively realistic use of resources and time frame given they were doing QA/UAT between regions. I could conceivably see them pushing out multiple iterations for teams to then dog feed for a few weeks and those staff would be largely engaged on other development while waiting for the feedback.
Same team may also have been working on non Switch services such as Nintendo’s website.
@gloom Nobody wants them to disable the news section. Go be delusional somewhere else lol
As I'm not a software developer, I'm not going to comment on the length of time to develop a minor feature for the console. But it does kill me that Nintendo continues to act like a small company. They are on pace to make $1.6 billion US dollars this year. Whatever the coding needs, pay some people for a browser, Netflix, cloud saves, and VC. It's getting ridiculous that the Switch doesn't have these things.
@SLIGEACH_EIRE
""With a team of 4-5 people"
Jeez, that's some commitment. They must have 1 person locked in a basement working on Virtual Console and another person working on a web browser."
Any decent development team will have several different roles including developer, manual tester, automation engineer, UX/graphic designer, someone to gather research and feedback, etc. That many people for one team isn't that surprising considering how robust the feature is.
@G_M I said it because people were literally saying this in these comments. Did you read them?
I love how many assumptions everyone here has made. No, obviously they didn't work full time for a year on this. Obviously, they started working on it at a certain point, with varying levels of focus, and "development" ended with the final OS and launch of the system.
@EasyDaRon It's more of a marketing algorithm than just programming push-notifications. The news you receive isn't necessarily the same as the news another regional device receives. Finding the right balance of respecting every region's privacy laws and Nintendo's child-friendly marketing while simultaneously providing the most targeted advertisement and tailored news experience for the most users possible is challenging.
As a software developer I can assure that developing even simple software solutions often isn't as simple as it looks - and I'm not even talking about topics like testability, maintainability, scalability, code quality and so on. Especially if you want good solutions that can exist for some time - without making trouble all the time - you have to invest a lot more time and money as a lot of people think. Hacking down some code that more or less solves a problem doesn't take much time... but that isn't the real challenge if you want to make a good job.
Should have only taken 5 minutes.
As a developer, I am offended with all those dumbbutt comments here from people who doesn't know anything at all!!!
Nintendo can't just use some off the shelf software here and be done with it. Everything needs to be made from scratch, to make it perform well, and use as little from the console resources as possible. A console OS can't be big and bloated!
I am also working in a team of four, with two backend developers, one fronted/designer and one tester. This is a perfect size for a team, working on a particular medium/large size feature.
Putting 30 to 50 people on such a task doesn't make any sense, if you want any quality and stable result out of it. It would be difficult to organize work, and keep up the coding standard.
Nintendo surely have plenty of small development teams like that, who maintain and develop different compact areas of the Switch OS. It makes perfectly sense.
The Switch OS is a really nice and slick OS. Fast and responsive. All needed to be made from scratch for the new console hardware and architecture. People do not realize how much work all this takes, and Nintendo has done a really good job here.
The Wii U had a bloated, slow and awful OS, where they had way to many features to start with, that prevented them to focus on performance. It was probably build on top of the old Wii OS to cut corners, and that didn't help them very much.
With the Switch OS, Nintendo has made all the right choices it seems. Thrown all the old bloated code out of the window, and started from scratch! They have focused on performance, speed and responsiveness before any features, and are now slowly building upon a great foundation.
I am really happy with the result, and wasn't sure Nintendo could pull it off after the messy Wii U OS. I can wait for all the other features and services, as long as I am getting some really quality stuff out of it, that doesn't destroy the overall performance of the Switch OS.
Adding the the chorus of people in the software development industry correcting the uninformed comments section. Just because something looks simple doesn't mean one guy could build it in a weekend.
What happened to our humble writer?
@Smigit The thing is, there is a lot of stuff to consider here.
The feature to get items in a game through the news section alone can easily be quite hard to implement.
The designing can also take a huge amount of time...
Does it look nice, with any theme selected? Do the japanese like it? Do the European like it? Do the americans like it? Let's ask testers from every region and try to redesign it until everyone is as happy as possible... And i'm not just talking about how it looks, but also about functionality.
It also has to run as smooth and fast as possible, especially since Nintendo seems to have high standards for that on Switch.
Then there are security measures.
Especially since the news section can include stuff for the games, it means it is possible to include foreign code over a proxy. This can be a huge opening for stuff like homebrew software that has to be closed.
Creation of development tools.
Creating new channels must be as quick and easy as possible in the future. So the tools to do that must be included.
Like you said, it is also possible that they were helping out with other things beside that. Who knows?
Stuff that may happen behind the scenes.
They could be collecting data complex data for statistics, for example.
Never forget: The testing phase.
Searching for bugs and fixing them can take up a lot of time by itself, if the software is supposed to run without any issues. There is a reason why so much software today is buggy as hell. Takes a lot of time/money.
Never forget: The server side of things.
The OS and maybe even hardware might be worked on while the news section is being developed. So they might suddenly have to change some things from time to time, just because of that.
And more I am not thinking about myself right now...
It is easy to underestimate how much work there is to be done in software development. Something that looks simple, might not be simple at all. Especially if you have to keep an eye on design and security and the software itself is completely new and not much based on anything exisiting (This is a software developed for a brand new system).
How long did the eShop take? 5 years?
@Kirgo yeah all valid and what I was alluding to. There’s a lot to consider. I’d put game integration in the “other infrastructure” bucket too but either way it’s highly likely that the team was doing more than rendering a few images and text in a grid but building a fleshed our system. That’s before we talk about other work on the OS, I doubt they worked in isolation, in fact you couldn’t.
I like it. Kinda wish Nintendo would get out the Virtual Console though. That would sell a lot of units.
Man, so many uninformed knee jerk reactions here.
@dres Well said.
lol. Is it April fools day already?
I don't have a Switch, I'm poor.
I like the news section. I check it every day as I log on as well as the eshop.
Further development I would like to see at least how many likes articles are getting and maybe an add your own channel section so you can add need feeds from other sites.
I hope the online service brings with it a community section so you can post your own activity and see friends activities.
Comments is unlikely but games ratings would be good to see on the eshop and better genre filtering at the top level rather than the search menu.
On the main menu would like to see the option to have the expanded more games grid rather than a single line of most recent babes played.
@macapple yep it would be good if they implemented ratings on the eshop, not dissimilar to the way they do it on the Wii U, where you could only rate the game after a certain amount of play time.
@dres The switch os works great (although it's perhaps a little bland). The news channel is a complete mess and is totally useless to me (and judging by the comments I'm not alone).
Simple, obvious functions that should have been included: separate news feeds for each user account, simple way to view news for a single game
@Garage What you don’t listen to armchair devs when you do your job?
Also kudos to the qa team and the interface designer as the news feed looks very intuitive but non intrusive. I only rag on devs for PR flubs or just a broken (which is different from I don’t like it, mind you) product, but after getting drafted to assist our QA team with our new product os testing...ugh I don’t want that job. I’d done QA work before, but never this much of my work week and I’m like “eww, over it”.
I’m am confused by the complaints about separating out the feeds from existing accounts though. Pretty sure Nintendo figured most people aren’t going to go through the hassle to set up an account for games that they can’t read or understand. Or at the very least aren’t in the process of learning. If someone is willing to set up two accounts it makes sense to keep them in the know for both regions.
@WiltonRoots That sounds like a good solution to me!
I personally really enjoy the news section myself. Sometimes life gets me too busy to play my Nintendo Switch, so I enjoy having a simple news app to look at some of the most popular recently released games. So for that, I thank the developers.
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