We’re about six weeks away from Nintendo’s Switch 2 Direct in April, and the company presumably preparing furiously for the full reveal of its upcoming hardware. Until then, we’re left to analyse statements around its financial results and other little announcements for clues about the Switch successor beyond its form factor. The firm’s latest announcement is tangentially related to Switch 2, and it comes as a big disappointment to many: Nintendo is scrapping its Gold Points scheme.
Originally launched in March 2016 as part of My Nintendo, a replacement for Club Nintendo, you won’t earn Gold Points on any eShop purchases after 24th March 2025. This means that anyone buying Switch 1 games on the upcoming successor won’t benefit from the loyalty system.
Is it surprising to see Gold Points retired as a highly anticipated new system approaches? Not really if you consider business factors, but waking up to the news on a grey Tuesday, it’s a genuine downer for anybody who’s found themselves turning to the digital ‘dark side’ with the Switch.
Along with the convenience of having your games on a single SD card, Gold Points offered small but tangible savings on digital games, essentially giving you 5% back from anything you bought on the eShop, and 1% on physical purchases. With occasional ‘2x Gold Points’ offers, buying a full-price £60 game could net you up to six quid’s worth of credit, and with all the deep discounts during the frequent sales, that could buy you an all-timer or two.
This wasn’t a massive saving, but it was consistent and coupled with those regular sales it gave you a genuine financial incentive to consider buying digital. Why would Nintendo kill the program now? Does it have something new in the works for Switch 2?
Well, call us cynical, but while 5% might seem like a modest discount, that’s a sizeable chunk of pure profit if you’re launching a hot new system with millions of users hungry to download new games. Nintendo may have some new loyalty scheme in mind for Switch 2 in the future, and with the backwards compatibility and the ability to buy current-gen Switch games on the new console muddying the waters, now is the most sensible time to kill the current program from the company’s perspective.
We wouldn’t be surprised if a Gold Points successor rolls out much later on Switch 2, certainly after the initial wave of interest has subsided and that 5% is safely perched on the profit column when the FY2025/26 financial results are posted.
Likewise, Game Vouchers won’t carry over to Switch 2 games. For anybody with a Switch Online subscription who’s interested in Nintendo-published games (the reason 99% of us have a Switch in the first place), £84.00 for two first-party games isn’t bad value – especially when you earned Gold Points on top of that. Unless you redeemed them for two £39.99 games, of course, in which case Nintendo got ya good.
Announcing some new loyalty scheme and launching it with fanfare down the road gives Nintendo’s marketing team a fresh angle to generate interest in Switch 2’s digital storefront — whatever that ends up looking like — once the launch-year frenzy is over. And while killing Gold Points now makes sense financially, as ever, it’s early adopters and the most loyal Nintendo fans that take the hit.
It’s a tough pill to swallow, then, and the fact that Nintendo knows you’ll swallow it makes it worse. Let us know in the polls below your thoughts on Gold Points being canned, if you think we’ll see a new type of loyalty program on Switch 2, and the best thing you’ve bought with Gold Points in the last few years.
