Nintendo has made its own Discord-like chat app for the Switch 2, and it’s going to charge you for it. Once the free period is over on March 31, 2026, GameChat, and the C button that activates it, will require a Nintendo Switch Online (NSO) membership.
So what happens if you aren’t a subscriber and press the C button? Not much, vice president of player and product experience Bill Trinen told Polygon in a recent interview.
“You would be able to find out about the NSO subscription there and get a sense of some of the functionality,” he said.
Presumably, this is how you’d learn that GameChat works a lot like Discord video chat works on PC. You can talk with your friends in handheld or docked mode via a built-in microphone and stream your gameplay to each other. There’s even a camera you can buy to overlay onto your stream, or just to chat face-to-face.
But unless you have an active NSO membership, you’ll have a whole button dedicated to nothing on your Switch 2. It doesn’t even sound like you can remap it to something else. It will just be a reminder of the $19.99 you may or may not be handing to Nintendo every year.
Trinen says the C button has a price tag because GameChat is “part of the overall platform experience” and that “NSO really is a critical piece of the Nintendo Switch 2 experience.” He listed off some of the new Switch 2-exclusive benefits, like access to old GameCube games and free upgrades to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.
That subscription fee will be on top of a console that’s already going to cost you $449.99 — or possibly more if U.S. President’s Trump’s tariffs prompt Nintendo to increase it. We won’t know if GameChat will prove to be worth it until the Switch 2 releases in June.
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Trinen says the C button has a price tag because GameChat is “part of the overall platform experience” and that “NSO really is a critical piece of the Nintendo Switch 2 experience.”
Those sound like reasons it should be free
That’s what I was thinking too… Here’s this thing that “critical” to the overall experience of this device you just purchased, so you’ve gotta pay more for it.
What if I just, umm, call my friends on discord and pay jack shit?
You guys have smartphones, don’t you?
Still waiting for the desktop pc 2 to drop
It just seems like every thing they tell us about the Switch 2 it gets to be a worse and worse investment. The price point of the console and the games are so high that I am not even considering buying Nintendo.
What is it about this new console that’s better than any other consoles? Why would anyone buy the S2 if the Steam deck is an option, for instance? Consumers can buy three or four great games on a PC/Steam deck for the cost of one Nintendo S2 game, and Nintendo games nearly never go on sale.
It’s almost like Nintendo knows they are due for a dud of a console and have just decided to punt on this one.
They seem to either knock it out of the park and have the best sales of the generation (NES, SNES, Wii, Switch, all of the handhelds) or they fail miserably and end up in last (N64, GameCube, WiiU).
cries in N64 nostalgia
Bruh dedicated hardware ad button.
If I ever get one I hope there are mod instructions on how to disable it.
I’m not going to buy one of these.
Next they will say physical games are just a shortcut to download the game from the digital store?
Ea did this to me years ago. Bought a nice big plastic case for the complete c & c. Contents. A but of paper with an origin code. I’m sure others have done it but that’s the only one I hit
On topic I haven’t see 1 good reason yo buy this thing but several not to
No.
WiiU had this and it was free (and few used it even then).
