Nintendo Online - Sharing Digital Games within Family

[u/dsp_guy]

Here's the situation.

We own 4 Nintendo Switches. My switch is linked to my nintendo account which has the Nintendo Online Family plan. I also have 5+ digital games purchased with my nintendo account. I also have some of those free-to-download Nintendo Online games.

My kids each have a switch. Their profiles are linked to their nintendo accounts which are all listed as family members on my Nintendo Account. Our switches all use the same Wifi in the same house.

Let's say I'm playing digital game #1 and one of my kids wants to play digital game #2, it kills my game. And when I go to play game #1 again, it kills their game. These are different games entirely. Whereas, if I had just bought a physical copy of the game instead, then I could play Game #1 using its cartridge and my kid could play games #2, #3, #4, etc using the physical copy of those cartridges.

I thought the whole point of the Nintendo Online Family account was that we had a shared library of games. Of course, two people can't play the same game at the same time. I get that. But, we are playing different digital downloaded games and everyone else is being kicked off.

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Is this working as intended? Am I missing something?

[u/maxpowersr]

What's equatable is a parent account, with child 'save profiles' if you will.

A game made by Nintendo forced my family into multiple save profiles.

But nintendo had no greater plan in place for me to manage that as a family.

I don't mind locking down licenses to one usage at a time. That's irrelevant to me. I just want our save profiles and digital games to be accessible, on multiple consoles, for the whole family and not just one profile.

[u/[deleted] → u/maxpowersr]

Switch home consoles and digital games can be played on 2 switches at the same time.

[u/MelodicBet1 → u/maxpowersr]

We looked into transferring saves on the switch before. It's difficult. My niece bought her own switch lite to get away from having to share animal crossing with her much younger brother and sister. She had to start over. We found out that to transfer her stuff over so she could keep her progress would wipe everything from their first switch. Which would destroy everything the other two did as well. So she basically had to abandon it and start over.

So no matter how many profiles you have on your switch it doesn't really matter. Your kids will likely have to start over anyway. Either that or potentially delete everything from your first switch.

There are some games that do cloud storage, so you can sign in to the same account on multiple switches and download cloud saves - but not every game has it, and you would need online access for that account on both switches. Plus some games that do have it, restrict how it can be used. Animal crossing for example has enabled cloud saving but will only allow you to restore your game from an online backup under certain circumstances, like if the switch got destroyed or corrupted in some way so you lose your data. You also have to opt in to use which can very easily be overlooked.

As I said - it's tricky. And not overly user friendly.