In the age of all devices needing some internet connection and lengthy account creation there’s been a long-standing piece of advice to set up these devices ahead of time should you want to gift them as presents. Now Nintendo has made this advice official ahead of Christmas 2021.

The official Nintendo customer service account, which serves Japan, has issued a general warning about the coming weekend and the load that its servers will be under.

You can find those tweets at the bottom of this page but, as you may expect for an account focused on Japan, it’s in Japanese.

Thankfully the message of the tweets isn’t too complex and was easily converted with some machine translations:

“This weekend, access will be concentrated on the [Nintendo Accounts] server, and it is expected that Nintendo Account will not be created immediately. If you are planning to use the Nintendo Switch family for the first time, we recommend that you create it in advance. If you have any questions about creating a new [Nintendo Account], please see this support page,” the messages reads.

That support page leads here, to another Japanese page. The English Nintendo Account page can be found here.

While we appreciate this advice from Nintendo we have two issues with this warning.

The first is that, even if Nintendo Accounts are created in advance, won’t logging into said accounts from those new gifted consoles also cause server strain?

Our second issue here is that Nintendo has some of the worst paid online experience out there, arguably worse than the other two consoles and way overpriced with what it offers, especially with the recent Expansion Pack nonsense that is some of the most greedy moves we’ve seen recently.

Paid online means a certain expectation is held by us, the consumers, when it comes to server stability. Consumers who pay for these services shouldn’t have to adapt how they use them because the company expects traffic.

Maybe that’s a bit unfair because even massive internet infrastructure companies like Amazon have the occasional downtime, but we’re not willing to give Nintendo a pass here.

Outside of all of this there’s also a bit of magic to opening up a console that’s brand new and still in original packaging.

Regardless this is now official advice from Nintendo so take heed if you’re gifting a Switch this holiday season.

#ニンテンドーアカウント の新規作成についてご不明な点は、こちらのサポートページをご覧ください。 https://t.co/CdToomg4hU

— 任天堂サポート (@nintendo_cs) December 20, 2021