All The Details On Nintendo’s Online Service

by Dylan Blight

Nintendo has today launched their online service meaning, yes, if you want to play your favourite games like Splatoon 2 or Mario Kart online, you will need this service.

You can sign up for a 7-day free trial right now, but it will lock you into a monthly subscription when redeeming the trial, so if you want to cancel before your 7 days are up, make sure you’re aware to manually cancel it.

A monthly subscription will cost you $5.95 a month, a 3 months subscription will be $11.95 and a yearly subscription will be $29:95. Alternatively, you can pay $54.95 a year for a family membership that can be shared with up to eight Nintendo Accounts. It’s also worth noting you can pay for your membership using any gold points you have saved up.

Along with the ability to play online, you get access to 20 Nintendo Entertainment System titles, with more coming in the future. These include big titles like Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda along with stuff like Tennis and Ice Hockey.

There are three different visual choices when it comes to playing the games as seen below.

You can play some of these NES titles online which is the one feature that separates them for the multitude of rereleases a lot of these games have had previously. However, you can only play with people on your friend’s list, and there is no multiplayer lobby for any of the titles which is disappointing.

Another feature for the Nintendo Online Service is the ability to back up your save data to the cloud. It appears that save data will backup automatically at some points as my NES date was backed up already when I went to do it manually. You can manually back up data for your games, though do be aware some games like Splatoon 2 do not support being backed up.

Nintendo promised other things like exclusive discounts for members but as of now, nothing is on the store.

When booting up a game like Splatoon 2 if you have a subscription active you jump into online lobbies as you would beforehand, there are no changes. Updating the mobile app will let you voice chat offer new abilities if they interest you though.

Will you be signing up for the Nintendo Online Service? Let us know in the comments below.