Make a Nintendo Account now if you’re gifting a Switch this week warns Nintendo
As amongst the first regions in the world to celebrate Christmas, Australian’s might get lucky with this, but it’s good to point out either way. As soon as the European’s and Americans wake up, it all goes to hell.
If you’re giving a Nintendo Switch console this Christmas period, particularly if it’s for a child, you should probably go ahead and set up a Nintendo Account now before the big day.
Not only will the person receiving the Switch be able to get started right away (and hopefully offer you a game), but on Christmas, Nintendo sell a lot of consoles, and a lot of people are trying to set up those consoles.
That means creating a Nintendo Account can be down, and the eShop to redeem and download games can be down too. Especially as many bundles with digital games have been sold this year – it pays to be prepared.
As a bonus, be sure to set up the account with parental controls to control how much and what they play. There’s an app for Apple iOS and Android users to control and monitor.
It’s not just us. Nintendo has tweeted explicitly from their (Japanese) customer service Twitter account this warning, it was down last Christmas and the Christmas before that – there’s a good chance it’ll happen again.
The good news is that a Nintendo account would only be necessary for redeeming download codes (such as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe from the Black Friday bundles) via the eShop, but this would not be necessary for downloading software updates, though these too could potentially be impacted by high traffic.
Either way, this seems like a pretty pathetic showing from poor destitute Nintendo. You’d think that they would be able to afford to improve their online infrastructure with those yummy holiday Switch dollars (not to mention 30 million [?] or so paying NSO subscribers).
For families, I would recommend not only setting up the NNIDs on any gift Switches, but also download any software updates for any physical releases in advance.