Nintendo has announced that Animal Crossing: New Horizons won’t support cloud saves for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers. There’s your $20 a year, Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, hard at work once again.
Nintendo’s reason is they don’t want people manipulating time in the game, even though time-traveling has been a staple of the Animal Crossing series since the first game. Or are they talking about cheating? Like Splatoon 2 players have been doing for months that Nintendo hasn’t done anything about?
Before this, I didn’t have a Nintendo Switch Online subscription out of lack of interest. There’s nothing the service offers right now that justifies me paying any amount for it. However, with this Animal Crossing announcement, it’s becoming a matter of principle. Nintendo isn’t trying. They talk about improving the service, but it continues to get worse. Or, at best, stagnant. They’re offering an inferior online service than even the Wii U has (which is free), but now they’re somehow getting away with charging for it.
They drip-feed old NES games onto the service and trumpet it as some kind of victory every time they do it. Nintendo Switch Online launched nine months ago, and there still isn’t one Super Nintendo or Nintendo 64 game available to play for it.
Now we get the great news that the one game that really, really could use cloud saves, a game that players will invest hundreds of hours into, and which losing your save would be catastrophic to the player, isn’t getting it.
Nintendo’s stubborn, insufferable apathy about the internet and basic features of online gaming needs to be called out by their fans. I still have every intention of buying New Horizons, but they manage to give me less and less reasons to give them money for Nintendo Switch Online, even for its paltry price.
Not acceptable, Nintendo. Improve the service.
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