this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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Everyone defending Nintendo in here for their online subscription fees are actually the mildly infuriating part for me personally. I'm a game developer and once attempted to develop an online game on Switch and other consoles. It was surprising to me to learn that exactly zero of the profits they rake in from their player base goes towards providing any server architecture whatsoever for developers on the platforms to use. This means that all costs associated with hosting servers for online functionality of games on the platform are the responsibility of each developer.
I fail to see what service they are providing apart from enabling players to access the Internet on a device they already paid for. I really don't think players understand this.
I also think it's important to point out that it's at least twice as difficult to get a game through Nintendo Lotcheck aka certification if you have any online features whatsoever due to their extreme requirements, which ends up costing a lot more development time. Steam on the other hand has an almost non existent certification process and charges players nothing to access the Internet.
I will end my rant with one more important point. I had my switch stolen a while back. I had been playing Animal Crossing for years, all through the pandemic and had a very nicely curated island and house. I had been paying for Nintendo Online monthly and had my island backed up. However I didn't purchase a new switch right away due to financial reasons and speed thought it foolish to keep paying my Nintendo Online membership so I canceled. After about 2 years I saw they announced a new update and finally had some extra money so I found a used Switch online. To my dismay, even though I reactivated my Nintendo Online subscription, Nintendo deleted my entire cloud save data repository for all my games, including Animal Crossing due to having not paid in over 12 months. This is unacceptable. Steam has not charged me a penny for online cloud service in all my years of having an account which started back on in the days of CS1.6. They have every save data file for every game I've ever played with zero threat of deletion. I cannot believe Nintendo thinks they were justified in deleting my data. I had to start Animal Crossing over from scratch. Needless to say I will not be subscribing to Nintendo Online ever again. Do not trust them with your data.
To me this was always the most insane part. Like I would pay for e.g. Xbox Live if it is stable, free of cheaters, etc. but they will not get me to pay for peer-to-peer how it's with Nintendo's own games. :O
Also, Steam being open means you can also use an app like Ludusavi to make your own savegame backups, just in case.
Steam is not open. It is literally DRM that locks down an open platform.
It's very light DRM and it doesn't lock the majority of game files nor the save files. You can freely back up the save files and it's very easy to pirate the games. What stops people from doing that is because it's much more convenient to have Steam manage them. Valve has always been all about convenience not the DRM.
That’s what Valve says, yes, but those are the virtues of PC, an open platform, not Steam - which is just a storefront and license provisioning service. PC games have portable game files by default, Steam implements one way to manage them. It is worth making the distinction, especially in a thread where the discussion is about what owning hardware means in a service-driven world.
I mean, Valve is doing the minimum copy protection for keeping both players and studios happy.
Let's not forget that Valve also has a dedicated device, the Deck, and it uses the same minimal methods as the PC version. It has a standard configuration out of the box because that makes sense for a pre-built device, but they allow you to hack it to your heart's content.
Meanwhile there are companies that feel the need to host their platform on completely locked down devices, like Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo, and invalidate your games on older devices so you'll buy them over and over again, and make you pay for Internet access etc.
There's also companies like Epic whose game store app on PC are very invasive.
So yeah, Steam is not completely open, but it's as good as it gets. There are much worse ways of doing things.
And then you realize the only reliable way to back up your saves is to... jailbreak the console and use homebrew save managers. Which Nintendo is doing everything in its power to stop from happening.
Personally I quite like my modded Switch OLED. But I genuinely can't see how anyone would use this console unmodded.
How long should Nintendo save your data when you aren’t paying them? Why should they keep it for any length of time?
Nintendo has qualification processes because bad games almost destroyed the industry in the 80s.
Steam doesn’t ensure quality. How would steam possibly try to charge for internet access on a device they didn’t produce, control, or sell you?
Businesses charge users for things that users value. Simple as that. It isn’t unique to Nintendo or the games industry. Cell phone folks charged for texts that didn’t cost them anything to deliver. Why? People valued texts and were willing to pay. We got out of that because of Apple but now people are angry at Apple about it.
So two things:
I'm sorry, have you seen the amount of absolute crap on the Nintendo eShop? What qualification process? It's a wasteland there.