Nintendo Advises New Switch Owners To Complete Setup Before Christmas To Avoid Disappointment

Ahhh, the joys of modern gaming.

Fake news, Switch sold zero units this month.

Also, MS advised this for Xbox.

https://www.purexbox.com/news/2021/12/set-up-your-new-console-before-christmas-advises-xbox-exec

But only Nintendo ever asks this so somehow it's related to Nintendo's servers and only Nintendo's!

NintenDoomed!
Go kids open your presents before Christmas 😁😂

Grandma is going to get a headache.

It’s worth doing it just to make sure that a) it works and b) to get the batteries charged. Christmas morning will be a disaster if the Switch was damaged during shipping.

Advice to Nintendo - Get better servers!

@dew12333 And I mean, NSO subscribers are supposedly paying for this. I hear all of the time about how NSO needs to cost money for servers, but yet, the "servers" suck.

Ah, the joys of being a Nintendo fan…. The busiest week of the year, and now I have to try to squeeze in an update for the Switch OLED’s we bought as Christmas gifts. Not happening…

@Harmonie I actually don't have an issue with the service when I am actually using it. But if they can see one then I don't think it's fair to make the problem the customers!

@FishyS Firstly, you don't have to tear anything to open a Switch, and secondly, most kids just want to get to the games, they don't want to wait for account setup and mandatory downloads.

yes yes and eat the birthday cake a week before your birthday too...logic

@dew12333 Same thing happens with Sony and Microsoft every Christmas.

I tell everyone to do this, open up, download the software updates, preinstall games, create accounts, then wrap it up. You really don't want to be doing all that setup Christmas morning

SO who are we tipping to have had the best Christmas? I reckon it will be close (if you add the other 2 up) but Switch is going to take it. I know quite a few folk grabbing one.

@GrailUK not close at all, even if you want a PS5 you can't find one anywhere.

@Splutter I mean, they are massive! Can't be that hard to find lol.

@faint Along with apple and a few other tech firms. But then I am an old bugger and we used to get power cuts because the grid couldn't cope, now they have improved things that much that these things don't happen.
If these companies run there systems so close to breaking then they should do better!

Thanks for the heads up.

Seriously - if you expected this to be a problem, invest in turning up more system / resource capacity to support.

@FishyS I’m fairly certain one can set up the account online, then link it to the Switch after they open it.

@RabidCanuck This happens every holiday on every major digital storefront...

@dew12333 holiday traffic impacts sony and ms as well. This happens every year.

You would expect from a modern company who make lots of money already that they will do something about it, but no...

Also worth downloading software updates, charging Joy-Con batteries etc.

Lmao at the people trying to act like this is a Nintendo problem. Y'all have heard of Christmas, right? That one day a year when 3 billion people decide to simultaneously call each other, Zoom, Facetime, and set up their brand new electronics?

Lol, "get better servers!" I love it.

@dew12333 A small lesson in digital infrastructure, you should not base your infrastructure around it's peak. Because that will cost you a lot of money the rest of the year.

Also it's not about the quality of the service, but about the amount of bandwidth available and the amount of servers to process the data.

@BloodNinja I know. You’d think they’d have learned by now.

But setting up a new console is part of the fun..for me at least.

@FishyS I'm sure a lot of parents would just give it unopened, but personally I'd always setup a device before giving it to my kids.

@Harmonie you know we live in a day and age where a game, a 24/7 online MMO, like FF14 had to be taken away from sales because there's not even enough chip and hardware to upgrade the servers anymore because of real world shortage and they can't bring anymore new players in?

Like NSO online could definitely be better but we're in a situation where a heck ton of things really aren't doing well right now.

If mmos such as FF14, which i'm pretty sure doesn't need to be introduced anymore because of that one meme, can't find server hardware I suspect a heck ton of people can't right now.

@RabidCanuck What is there to learn amidst chip shortages, which are used for running servers? There are more people than ever utilizing online services, which all run on machines, which all require materials. Stuff is bound to get mucked up during high volume periods.

@BloodNinja I work in that space, so you’re preaching to the choir. The days of turning up a new physical server in your own racks is passé. Cloud services are the way to go (e.g. S3 buckets) which can be turned up on a dime when peak is high, and ramped down after the rush. I’d be very surprised if Amazon, Microsoft or Google aren’t able to provide the needed capacity.

This ain't big news or anything, it's the same on Playstation where if you try to download a game Christmas day it's taking way longer than usually because of how many people are doing the same thing.

So I’m assuming Nintendo of America will release a New Years sale instead of an Xmas/Boxing week sale to avoid the increased traffic to the Eshop during that time frame.

@badmotorfinger74 to be fair, this will likely be the case with all platforms. At least Nintendo are being upfront about it, up to us buyers whether we want to go ahead and open them. It IS a good idea to have all the necessary updates done, accounts made and set up… just not realistic for most I suspect.

@AmplifyMJ

I fully agree.

This isn’t the PlayStation 2 where you just plugged it up and put a disc in the tray.

All of the modern consoles require set up. It’s fairly simple even for non tech people, but it does consume time.

@TheRedComet I have done it in the past for nephews getting a Wii U for Christmas, not something their parents wanted to mess about with and they were happy enough for me to open everything up and sort it out.

@Ludovsky Yeah, I'm aware of the issue. I play FFXIV. There for a while, the servers got very overloaded after the release of the newest Expansion Pack, Endwalker.

It's only been the last several days that I've seen a substantial decrease in the queues. Even then I still get queues upward of 900 in the evenings. It's better than the 4,000+ I was seeing a couple of weeks ago, though!

Kids need to go back to the cassette game loading days and learn a bit of patience.

While technically it's all true, the advice to "please open and use Christmas presents before you give them" kid if kills the entire joy of Christmas presents where everything is new in box unopened and untouched by non-elf hands.

If a kid is so ungrateful that the experience of opening a brand new toy and experiencing the initial setup of it's first time use from beginning to end is just too much hassle, they should have been on the naughty list and got a lump of coal, instead, anyway.

I know this wasn't the topic of the article, but that "The Switch may be approaching its 5th Birthday" comment made me fail the "try not to feel old" challenge.

@BloodNinja this exactly.

In fact this is what made going over to the Switch easier, because I used the same Network ID I use on the 3DS

@RabidCanuck lol good luck. Nintendo is brain dead when it comes to online and wouldn't think to use cloud servers. Another thing to think about is price point... they would pass the cost to us in the form of making Online cost way more than it already does.

And that right there is another can of worms, Online (even with its Expansion Pak tier) isn't really worth it if they where to raise the price to compensate for cloud servers. The feature set is lackluster compared to what features are available on Xbox/PlayStation. Unless they where to vastly improve before raising the price point to compensate they would lose subscribers en masse.

I should do this with all the cartridge games in my backlog. Load them up to install patches and updates (just in case I ever decide to play them 😉).

@dew12333 what's your point Sony and Xbox go done all the time.

Lol last time I checked on xmas day all 3 consoles servers have issues...I wonder why????that's right it's because everybody who has a console is on it lol

@AmplifyMJ yeah, I agree to some extent. Certainly Nintendo’s servers will be getting majorly slammed with the success of the Switch, but I don’t recall ever having an issue with Sony or Apple devices on Christmas morning (beyond the usual massive game updates). I love Nintendo, but sometimes I think we as Nintendo fans expect less of them.

@JasmineDragon
Loser Nintendo couldn't even git gud at server-ing. Sad!

I regret the SNES era. seriously.

I always found it exciting to set up new electronics! Christmas is also so busy often that there won't even be a chance to really use the Switch until the next day.

The paid online subscriptions were supposed to fund a better server infrastructure.

@sanderev Net Profit - 171.8 billion Yen (approx $1.5 billion USD) - down 19.4% on previous year
Would it cost more than that?

@Darkyoshi98 I think that if there systems cannot cope then they should be improved, really they are saying that if everyone they sold online too happened to go online at the same time it might break or run badly. That for me is just not good enough so they need to improve it.

@dew12333 I don't know how much their servers cost, but for a server you need:

1. Hardware.
2. Power and internet.
3. Someone to manage it.
4. A location to store it.
5. Rights / legislation in a country to have that location there.

And it's most commonly not just one server. With maybe millions of new users and around 10k users per server, it could get very expensive very quickly.

And this is just to allow people to sign their new Switches into their Nintendo account and access the eShop.

@Kayvoo I'm sure they will invest as it grows. Give em chance.

@sanderev I am just going have to be a fussy bugger here because I get it but still think that they should improve.

@NEStalgia,

Without a doubt, the ungrateful little buggers, a nice long download is what they deserve.

Btw took the plunge and bought a Series X and a new telly to go with it, pretty awesome to be honest, had not touched Resi 7 or Jedi fallen order on my Xbox One since I bought them, both now have all new fancy 4K and HDR updates.

Got a LG OLED to go with it, I was long overdue a new telly anyway, looks awesome.

https://www.lg.com/uk/tvs/lg-oled48c16la

@johnvboy Hey, you finally did it! Congrats! And that's a heck of a TV, too!

You're going to love the XSX. Just a fantastic console. I've said it before, but 3DS remains my favorite console, having supplanted SNES. Switch was on track to become my favorite, but it lost some momentum, and I think XSX may have the potential to eclipse 3DS and SNES...it's just so smooth and seamless to just jump around your library and pleasant to use. 3DS being the exception, it's the most fun a console has been since they left cartridges dropped to 30fps, moved to discs. PS5, too, but that's mostly "just a game player", the XSX feels like such a complete package, especially if you get Game Pass and can just try all sorts of games.

You missed the drama of my thread over on pxb, but just 4 days after my warranty should have expired, my XSX failed, seemed like a PSU failure. I was playing FH5 for a few hours, and suddenly it just shut down, and that was that, wouldn't come back up. I've used it a decent amount all year, but right after warranty was a shocker. Fortunately it seemed pre-registered by the retailer and somehow I ended up with an extra 2 weeks on the 1 year warranty than I should have had. I was able to send it out for repair and they turned it around pretty fast, about 2 weeks, and I was back up in time for Halo (which I'm only slightly touching, because I'm waiting for coop in May.) I bought an XSS as a backup in the meantime because I have far too much money invested in the ecosystem to lose access to. XSS was a little disappointing in that games with an X1X patch only run the OG X1 version of the game, so some things actually look worse than on my old 1X, but for new games it's a cute little powerhouse. I'm probably going to set it up as a local streaming console now that Yakuza is being removed from Game Pass, and thus no streaming, and thus I have like 500 hours of the series left I want to stream to the small screen

I haven't heard of widespread failures at all, so I think I just drew the short straw.

@NEStalgia,

Yes the LG is pretty decent, sorry to hear about your series x, but good news about the warranty, the series s is always pretty easy to pick up so it should see you through.

I bought my series x off E-bay only paid £40 over retail not too bad, funny thing is because I had got one I was on the pure x box forums, and just by chance was on when somebody posted there were series x consoles on Amazon UK, logged in and got one to checkout and payment, of course if I had not already got on I would not have been in the position, but still.......

One surprising thing is how awesome the Switch looks on the new T.V, even the 720p home screen looks nice and seems to have been boosted somehow, as of yet I have no series x games, but do need to get Forza and Resi village..... just need to finish Resi 7 first...

@johnvboy I think that big wave at Amazon UK drove scalper prices down for the moment, so you still benefited from it! I hadn't even seen you over on PXB, but I have a feeling I will from now on

Instead of a TV I'm using a 27" 4k monitor (but up close so the pixel level details matter) and Switch very much depends on the game. Nintendo games with their smooth art style scale very well. ACNH, much as I detest it looks practically native short of the lack of AA, it relaly looks great. Other games like Ys9 looks pretty awful. Granted, that one doesn't even looks a little rough on PS5, but it's just gross on Switch. So it depends how well the content scales on the big screen for a given game. I'm sure your C1 has a better scaling chip than almost anything else, so it benefits from that, though my monitor is also an LG and seems to have a decidedly better than average scaling chip as well.

@NEStalgia,

I have been tracking the prices on e-bay for around 7 months or so, and it's been pretty easy to pick up a Series X or PS5 for around £480 to £520, I think it's got to the stage where scalpers just buy for the sake of it, and of course £40 a time is still a decent little earner for them, even more so if you are doing it multiple times.

There are so many online media sites and social media trackers stoking all this, and of course with their links to the retailers for commission as well, all in the guise of helping the average customer to buy a sort after console naturally.

Yes the scaling chip makes a big difference, and pretty much most native 1080p content will look pretty decent on a 4K display, Animal crossing looks awesome on my projector, and I run it through my Onkyo TX-RZ3100.

https://eu.onkyo.com/en-GB/solr-hide/tx-rz3100/p/156615

@johnvboy It sounds more manageable in the UK. I'm not sure what the current conversion rate is, but in the US, until last week most marketplaces (Walmart, Amazon, eBay) scalpers we're running $900-975. Last week it dropped to around 820-850. There's another eBay like dealer that used to specialize in sneakers and limited clothing (where the whole scalping thing inexplicably started) and moved into electronics as this grew. They're a bit cheaper usually, previously $720-780, now $620-680.... But that store has processing fees and shipping fees that add another $55 or more to it. Last winter the scalpers we're over $1k though. Definitely sounds less crazy in the UK! Though you had the infamous thieves riding rooftops on moving trucks on launch day 😆

I still wonder how much demand is just toilet paper syndrome playing out. Though those November numbers compared to 2014 in that story here a free weeks ago seems like supply is genuinely dire, but Sony keeps giving numbers that say it isn't and it's all demand. Sony's numbers never added up since launch though, I think they're doing some Enron math and counting heads twice somewhere in those reports...

I still have an Onkyo that was one of the first receivers ever with HDMI! That's back when we thought the avr world be the center of the system and switch everything.... Then tvs and HDMI kept getting reinvented and tvs became the switcher and we'd have been better off with good old audio-only tube rigs and an external decoder. Live and learn.... I still have a Denon in reserve. Supports 3d tv. That puts a date on it...

@NEStalgia,

My very first receiver in my home cinema was an Onkyo TX-SR875 this was one of the first receivers to decode the new lossless audio formats, Dolby Tru HD and Dts Master Audio, as long as your Blu-ray player bitstreamed both codecs, not always a guarantee with the initial players.

I began to run into issues with newer Blu-ray's from Lionsgate that had branching on the disc, the audio would keep dropping out for a split second, worked fine with PCM, but you lost the audio quality, so hence the newer receiver and the latest Atmos and Dts X formats are no slouch either.

Yes the stock situation for the Series X and PS5 is nuch easier, and as I said you can't just order one online or walk into a store, unless of course you are very lucky, but it looks like there is a constant stream of scalped stock on E-bay for pretty near retail, of course you do get more expensive listings but you just steer clear of them.