When you’ve dedicated hours of your life to playing a game there are few things worse than losing all your hard-earned progress. Unfortunately, this is a very real risk that Nintendo Switch owners currently face.
Going back to the tense days of corrupted PlayStation memory cards and dying Game Boys, the Nintendo Switch doesn’t offer any way to back up game saves. That means that if your Switch console is lost, stolen or breaks all of that progress you made in Super Mario Odyssey will just disappear. Like the entire adventure never happened.
Compared to PlayStation and Xbox’s cloud storage and physical back up capabilities, this leaves the Nintendo Switch looking slightly behind the times. Fortunately, according to Nintendo of America boss, Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo is actually “aware of the concern” and working on a solution.
Looking for a Switch solution
In an interview with Mashable, Fils-Aime said “You’re talking to someone who has completed 120 Shrines, and I think I’m at 400 Korok seeds and growing [in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild]. So I understand what it’s like putting a lot of time into content, and the thought of that content not being there.”
He went on to say that being a consumer-oriented company and desirous of making them happy, this is an area Nintendo is “going to continue working on to make sure that we can alleviate some of those consumer fears of having a content-based issue.”
It is, apparently, the hybrid nature of the console that’s causing some complications when it comes to developing a solution and Fils-Aime lamented that “it’s not as simple as a piece of hardware that never moves and is always connected in an online environment.”
At the moment, the closest we’ve gotten to data back up on the Switch is the ability to move user profiles from console to console. Unfortunately, this doesn’t actually back up any of the save data at all.
It’s worth noting that cross-save is actually possible between the PS4 and the handheld Vita so we hope a solution will be swift. At the very least, it’s good to know that Nintendo is working on it.
