Nintendo dedicated a whole lot of time during the Switch 2 reveal to GameChat, a Discord-like app that lets you chat with friends and share live gameplay with each other. If the dedicated button on the controller didn't give it away, Nintendo thinks of this as a "defining feature" of the new console, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and cult puzzle hit Baba Is You helped convince the devs they were on the right track.
"When we were developing GameChat, we had in mind that it would be a defining feature of Switch 2," Sumikazu Ono, who directed the development of the console's built-in features, says in a new official Q&A from Nintendo. The company's executives were among the early testers of the feature, and watching them trade tales of the development of the SNES and Nintendo 64 helped the team realize GameChat's potential.
"We spent about two hours every day playing various games while sharing screens via GameChat, and continued researching the kinds of situations in which it would be fun to use this feature," Ono says. Baba Is You, an acclaimed 2019 puzzle game about pushing boxes in levels with constantly changing rules, happened to be one of the games streamed during one of these sessions.
"The rest of us were curious to know what kind of game it was," Ono says. "The person who was playing the game shared their screen and said, 'It's a game played with these rules.' And we were all like, 'Wow, we didn’t know such an interesting puzzle game existed!' Fast forward a day and the whole team was playing it. (Laughs) That was a moment where game screen sharing really shone."
More than just serving as a way to discover new games, the team also found that GameChat could transform the experience of playing certain titles. "When I tried out GameChat with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, what I found interesting was that I felt like I was playing an online game even though it isn't one," according to technical director Eiji Tokunaga.
"Suppose two friends are playing the game at their own pace, separately from one another," Tokunaga explains. "When one of them says, 'I don't know how to solve this puzzle,' the other could say, 'I'm on my way there, wait for me,' go to the same location in their own game and share their screen to demonstrate how to solve the puzzle. A phrase like 'I'm on my way there, wait for me' is something you don't hear when playing offline games. That's when I felt strongly that this feature could bring additional value to existing games."
Ono repeatedly refers to GameChat as a "defining feature" of the new console, and it's clear Nintendo is serious about it – even if the feature might seem absurdly familiar to anyone who's used Discord, which offers a built-in screen sharing option on PC. While it might not genuinely be revolutionary for anybody who games on non-Nintendo platforms, it certainly seems like it'll be a great option to have for all those upcoming Switch 2 games.
Be sure to keep up with all of yesterday's announcements in our roundup of Nintendo Switch 2 Direct news.
