Nintendo has announced that there will not be any kind of video streaming services available on the Nintendo Switch upon launch. According to some answers to questions that Kotaku fired over to Nintendo, the Switch will not feature any sort of video streaming services or video capture apps at launch. The console will come packaged with a Mii Maker app, though – which we suppose is something.
This news comes as a huge surprise because it practically feels mandatory at this point for a new console to have at least Netflix available on it.
Netflix is readily available across a huge range of devices, including games consoles like the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. Even the Wii U allows users to access Netflix, along with Hulu, Crunchyroll, Amazon Video and loads more, but admittedly these came to the system much later.
The Wii U at least provided a YouTube app alongside the other launch titles to tide people over, but Nintendo seems to be putting 100% of their focus on creating a video-game dedicated hybrid system.
However, Nintendo has expressed their interest in adding such services to the Switch in future updates, along with support for Wii and Wii U controllers – yet another thing that the Switch will not feature at launch.
So far, Nintendo has done a pretty bad job of persuading us that the Switch is going to be worth picking up on launch day, so for now, I think we’ll wait for it to go down in price (and perhaps up in features, too).