Nintendo announces My Nintendo Gold Coin discount scheme for Switch owners
Nintendo has just announced that Nintendo Switch rewards are finally coming to My Nintendo early March and it’s just a little bit different to what we were expecting.
From early March you’ll be able to spend any Gold Coins you’ve accumulated in My Nintendo and use them to discount games available on the Nintendo Switch. You can pay for some of the game or all of it with your Gold Coins.
Going forward whenever you buy a new game digitally you’ll get Gold Coins worth 5% of what you’ve paid. If you buy a game physically you’ll get 1%. You can then use those points to put toward your next game. It works out to be 1 Gold Point = 1 cent in AUD.
While the amount of Gold Coins you have now might not be impressive Nintendo is upping the rate at which you receive them. Nintendo’s example is below;
If you pay $50 for a game on Nintendo eShop, you’ll receive 250 Gold Points.
Next time, you’ll be able to use those points and save $2.50.
Once you earn them, Gold Points remain valid for 12 months, they’ll always expire at the end of the month as well. Lucky for you that means anything earned when the Switch was released up until now is safe.
Full details are available on Nintendo’s website, it gives you the rundown of how much you’ll earn on each purchase, and you can still earn gold coins on the Wii U and 3DS but can only use the discounts on the Switch.
1 Gold Point = 1 cent
Pretty stingy, but better than nothing I guess.
Most eshop prices can be beaten instore (or on other consoles/PC, if available) by a lot more than 5% anyway.
Where I feel that this is a great step rewarding customers. I know that I am in the minority but I’ve spent $900 (a rather exorbitant amount, I know) on the eShop in the last year and I’ve only got a measly amount of points left of 554…
I’ve earnt 880 gold points from the eShop and additional 244 gold points from registration of Game Cards. I’ve spent 650 gold points and had 80 expire.
I hope that they look into this and increasing the worth of existing points as the generation of points is now vastly different with $1 on the eShop = 5 Gold points and $1 retail = 1 Gold point. This would net me in the last year earning closer to 5000 gold points or $50 eShop credit. Even with the purchases I’ve redeemed, this would still equate to about 28 $15 eShop game purchases worth of points which is closer to $21 rather than the $5.54 I have. I know that this is quibbling over peanuts but seems a bit frustrating to be an early adopter on a lot of these games.