As you might have heard, Nintendo Switch digital games will be linked to accounts and not hardware. This means that unlike previous Nintendo consoles, your digital purchases aren’t locked to specific hardware. However as we had previously heard, this isn’t as good as we thought as it was revealed that you can’t share purchases across multiple consoles.
This means that you can’t buy one game and use them with the same account on multiple Switches. Now thanks to a report from Polygon, more details have surfaced regarding this limitation. So like we said purchases are linked to accounts, but according to Polygon, they’re usable on one console at a time. So whenever you sign into your account on a Switch, that device becomes your primary console.
So if you wanted to sign into a different device, you’ll have to deactivate the existing console before switching over. That means that all digital purchases and games won’t be playable on that console anymore, but they’ll remain accessible via your account. This also means that in the event you lose your console and buy a new one, you’ll still have to call Nintendo to deactivate the previous console’s account before you can restore and play your games.
While the tying to account is a good change on Nintendo’s part, this limitation does make it quite a pain. However unless you don’t plan to sell off your Switch or if you only plan to use it at home, then we guess it won’t really affect you too greatly.
Filed in . Read more about Nintendo and Nintendo Switch.