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Comment by Slackwise | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo seems to do customer support fine with hardware, but their treatment of digital products and data is extremely hostile.

The Switch has a backup feature, but the backups are hardware ID locked, so if you lose your Switch and get a replacement, lol, the backups are useless. This is made worse because even though you may have a physical cartridge game, the actual save files are on the machine.

Personally I had a run in with this when I upgraded to a 3DS XL, and I didn't check for dead pixels until after I transferred all my data. They locked the transfer feature for a week+ so I couldn't go and get my device replaced for a week, and my data was held hostage on a machine with stuck/dead pixels dead center on what is already a low resolution display.

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The Switch has a backup feature if you pay for their Nintendo Switch Online service, which is more competitive with PS2 online services than with anything from Microsoft or Sony in the last decade.

Sadly, this isn't totally true -- Sony only does cloud backups via PS+, a paid subscription. Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn't require their paid service to use cloud saves, but they're more tightly integrated into the system (likely because they're available to all users).

It sucks because the X360/PS3/Wii generation of consoles supported saving & loading games off of external commodity storage (the X360 supported any USB drive, the Wii SD cards, and the PS3 both, if you had one of the earlier units with a SD card slot), but that was disabled as it became clear that save games could be used to jailbreak the systems and install bootloaders/firmware that disabled DRM.

PS4 still lets you backup saves to a USB stick, last I checked? It's a shame that the Xbox One doesn't, and we're on to the new generation now in any case.

As far as I'm aware, PS4 doesn't do cloud backups if you don't have plus. Or am I wrong?

Maybe not cloud backups, but if I'm not mistaken it does local backups: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps4-back-...

If you don't pay Nintendo a monthly fee, the Switch has no backups. Console gets stolen (more likely than its competitors, since it's a portable system) or you have a hardware failure? Everything's gone.

I have a Switch, but the only games I'll buy for it are ones where I wouldn't particularly care if it destroyed all my save files. Had that experience after a Wii hardware failure and I never went back and finished any of the games I was partway through because I didn't want to replay the first 3/4 of them just to get to the last bit.

Should have mentioned here, the reason Nintendo doesn't have this is probably that you could use it to cheat at Pokemon trading by restoring a backup to get back copies of things you'd given away.

Because that's more important than making sure their customers don't lose literally all the game progress in all of the games that they've played.

I can't imagine pouring hours and hours into your Animal Crossing island on a console that has an SD card slot and doesn't let you make a backup. Someone's going to learn a hard lesson from that about where Nintendo's priorities are.

I still really don't get why not have cloud backups on Animal Crossing. Like, they are afraid people are going to cheat. But... it's not a multiplayer game. The only thing you do is visit other peoples' islands.

THERE'S NOTHING TO CHEAT.

I think you're confusing Switch and 3DS. They changed the Switch so that most games can be cloud-saved, and it'll automatically copy your saves if you have two systems with the same games on them. Game licenses also carry with you if you're online with multiple systems, and the offline half of the license can be remotely revoked and transferred.

Animal Crossing and Pokemon are outliers. The former has a backup system that only can be used if you call Nintendo customer support. If you plan your transfer ahead of time you can do it yourself, 3DS-style, but it took them multiple updates to implement that. (Part of this is because the island is owned by the system, not individual users, which is an odd design choice.) I have no idea how Game Freak expects you to keep your Pokemon saves safe.

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