The new Virtual Game Card feature lets you easily manage your digital Nintendo Switch games, including lending to your Nintendo Account Family Group members!...
This was way more confusing than it had to be.
TL;DR: You can lend your digital games to friends & family for 14 days, but both consoles need to connect locally to enable this…(?)
You can’t play digital games you’ve lent out during this time. I guess the point is making it similar to giving your friend a physical game cartridge.
Right now you can absolutely share digital games. You do need to have your account logged in on both machines and only the one where your “main” account sits can play the games offline.
This seems both easier and harder? There are now arbitrary time limits and per-game activations, which seems like a massive mess. Before the only limit was that a game couldn’t be played in two places at once and that secondary consoles needed to stay online.
But conversely, the “main account” thing was annoying for a portable, so if you shared with someone that carried their console around outside the house it kinda required giving THEM the main account with all the games and keeping the secondary for yourself. This is a very parent-like situation to be in. So… that’s better?
The worry here is that this sure seems like setting the groundwork to give up on physical media altogether without messing with the way people use Nintendo portables, and that is a bad thing overall. Given Nintendo’s dumb, litigious approach towards these things they’re getting no benefit of the doubt from me in this area.
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So I’m torn on this until I can test it.
Right now you can absolutely share digital games. You do need to have your account logged in on both machines and only the one where your “main” account sits can play the games offline.
This seems both easier and harder? There are now arbitrary time limits and per-game activations, which seems like a massive mess. Before the only limit was that a game couldn’t be played in two places at once and that secondary consoles needed to stay online.
But conversely, the “main account” thing was annoying for a portable, so if you shared with someone that carried their console around outside the house it kinda required giving THEM the main account with all the games and keeping the secondary for yourself. This is a very parent-like situation to be in. So… that’s better?
The worry here is that this sure seems like setting the groundwork to give up on physical media altogether without messing with the way people use Nintendo portables, and that is a bad thing overall. Given Nintendo’s dumb, litigious approach towards these things they’re getting no benefit of the doubt from me in this area.