After the concept was revealed during the Nintendo Direct in late March, the Virtual Game Card update for the original Nintendo Switch has now gone live. However, reports are now surfacing that along with that update, a loophole allowing multiple Switch systems to share one digital copy of a game for online play has been closed, which forces each Switch to now own its own copy of said game.
According to Eurogamer, before the update, if a single Nintendo Account was logged in to two separate Switch devices, those devices could both boot up a game owned by that account and play it online together. With the new update, if one Switch has the game booted up and is playing online, the other is no longer able to join them.
The Eurogamer report has discovered a workaround that will allow two Switch systems to play the same game, though without online play, via a new Online Licenses option in the console settings. For this to work, when a Virtual Game Card is sent from one Switch to another, the Online Licenses options must be activated on both consoles. Then:
- The Switch console that received the Virtual Game Card must play the game offline
- This will allow the Switch console that sent the Game Card to play the same game, as the console doesn’t recognize offline play, and therefore will not be able to “see” the Virtual Game Card in use by the console that received it.
Multiple online forums, including ResetEra and Reddit, have voiced displeasure with the change, with one Reddit user noting that this will now force families with multiple Switch systems to buy a copy of a game for each Switch in order to continue playing online. “With two kids, game sharing saved us a lot of money, given that each digital game was effectively two copies,” user Synkhe writes. “This update doubles our cost on all games going forward.”
Nintendo has also announced a GameShare feature that will be available with the Nintendo Switch 2 when it launches on June 5. However, this feature will only be available for certain games, and it will only work when each Switch console is connected to the same local network.
