The Nintendo Switch Online Playtest has reached their quota of applicants.
This doesn’t really come as a surprise, but you may be shocked at how quickly it happened. As we reported yesterday, registration opened on October 10, 2024 8:00 AM, Pacific. Seven minutes later, the Nintendo of America Twitter account announced that registrations were over.
OatmealDome, who has proven to be a reliable source for Splatoon and Nintendo information in the past, shared some details about the registration, as he was lucky enough to get in. Don’t worry, he didn’t break Nintendo’s trust yet, but we’ll get to that.
On Twitter, he shared Nintendo’s message explaining that players are not to share the details of the playtest. As OatmealDome clarified, this is not a legally binding non-disclosure agreement.
As you may already be thinking of, this sounds very similar to the situation surrounding Valve’s Deadlock. To sum things up quickly, tech media outlet The Verge wrote up a preview of Deadlock, and their staff were later locked out of access from the game. The Verge staff also faced a firestorm of criticism from gamers themselves.
We won’t relitigate the exact details of that incident here. What’s relevant is that Deadlock had a similar prompt where Valve asked players not to share details of the game because it is in early alpha. The Verge did not violate any legal agreements.
The issue was not the legality, but the principle that makes those legal agreements necessary. If gamers thought that Deadlock was in a bad state which would hurt Valve’s ability to make the game, and sell its idea to fans. Grand Theft Auto 6 actually experienced that reputational harm when an early build of the game was leaked.
Valve and Rockstar Games have since taken actions to mitigate any reputational harm they would get from these leaks. Regardless of what you think game journalists are obliged to report or act upon, it’s reasonable to expect game companies like Valve, Rockstar, and Nintendo to want to keep their secrets.
Now, we do want any registered playtesters reading this to think long and hard if about their position. Nintendo’s requirements were that you were a Switch Online subscriber, legally an adult, and in a select number of countries where Nintendo can clearly, easily take legal action against you. Surely you can see why they didn’t put playtesters under a real NDA. Of course, it’s possible an actual NDA is coming later.
The last detail of interest here is that there will be a 2.2 GB download for the playtest. As some fans speculated that this playtest is for cloud gaming, we will point out that a cloud gaming app does not need to be as big as 2.2 GB.
We won’t claim to know what this playtest is for, but if you’ve been a Nintendo fan for at least a year, you will know that 99 % of the rumors and speculation fans make about Nintendo turn out to be fake or wrong.
We do expect someone will try to spoil what this playtest is about, and honestly, Nintendo knows that too. So it will be very interesting to see what will be coming out of the Nintendo grapevine in the coming weeks.
