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A year of Nintendo Switch Online costs R262 in South Africa

With Nintendo Switch Online launching in just two days, we now know just how much we will be paying for the service here in South Africa.

Right now there are three different options available if you’re looking for a single membership (one month, three months, and twelve months) as well as a yearly subscription for the eight-account family membership. These are priced as following:

  • One-month individual: R52
  • Three-month individual: R105
  • Twelve-month individual: R262
  • Twelve-month family: R459

For a change these prices actually compare favourably with those in the US. Over there you will be paying $3.99 / $7.99 / $19.99 / $34.99 respectively. Going off of the current conversion rate, that’s around R59.52 / R119.19 / R298.21 / R521.98.

This is welcome news given that the “Switch tax” is usually high in this country with certain games coming in at twice the price when compared to other platforms.

While it would now be easy to say that these are very low prices when compared to the local costs of Xbox Live and PlayStation Plus, we’re loathed to compare Nintendo Switch Online to those services considering how little you’re getting for your money.

Remember that the biggest draw here, aside from being able to play online, is the ability to create cloud backups of your saves. Yes these two essential services are behind a paywall on Nintendo’s console.

The only other features on offer here are NES games that have been altered to work online, and some nebulous “exclusive offers” which have not been revealed days before launch.

On the official South African page of the service they also list use of the smartphone app as a featured, but we really don’t consider that a bonus given how clunky the system is.

While, at this point, we would recommend voting with your wallets and not paying for the service so Nintendo wakes up and offers online functionality on par with what we’d expect in 2018, we understand that it’s an impossibility for some.

The thought of losing our 500+ hour Enter the Gungeon save without cloud backups is making us very antsy, and we know many more people out there have longer hours than that in other games.

Aside from ditching the Switch as a console altogether, all you can really do now is pay up or risk losing your saves and give up online play.

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