Yesterday it was discovered that a whole bunch of Nintendo Switch games will not support cloud saves. This is quite shocking as part of Nintendo Switch Online’s appeal is the fact that cloud saves will become available for the Nintendo Switch, which was previously not a service that Nintendo provided. The fact that a large portion of games will not support cloud saves makes the entire service less appealing.
The games that have thus been discovered to not support cloud saves are Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee
Nintendo has responded with a statement to Gameinformer regarding this issue but that statement is very lackluster. According to Nintendo, these games do not support cloud saves in order to secure fair play. Nintendo is afraid that enabling cloud saves for these games will make it easier for gamers to hack into the games and create an unfair advantage for themselves.
This reason doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. As of right now, there are tons of people hacking their saves in Splatoon 2 in order to avoid the grind or to place themselves at the top of the leaderboards. Enabling cloud saves for these games would probably make them more secure rather than a bigger risk for competitive integrity.
Furthermore, cloud saves are a part of the service that people will be paying for when Nintendo’s online service goes live so disabling this service for certain games is definitely not appreciated. It will can also screw over people if they lose their Nintendo Switch and subsequently lose all the progress they made in certain games.
Overall it’s a pretty poor decision by Nintendo. Disabling cloud saves does not give them any major advantage but is quite unfair to all the Nintendo fans that will be paying for their online service. Nintendo once again proves that their management is quite out of touch with what gamers want and need, despite the company making some of the best video games in history.
