James Martin/CNET
Little-known fact: If your Nintendo Switch gets lost or stolen, your saved games are toast. Unlike on Xbox and PlayStation, there’s no way to backup your 200-hours of Breath of the Wild anywhere else — at least not until the $20-a-year Nintendo Switch Online service adds cloud saves when it launches later this month.
But we’re just learning today that not every game will necessarily support the feature. Zelda? Looks like. But Nintendo has quietly revealed that games including Dark Souls and Pokemon may not.
As a member of gaming forum ResetEra noticed earlier today, the rather telling phrase “This game does not support Save Data Cloud Backup” now appears in the fine print for a handful of games at Nintendo’s website. Here’s the full list we’ve confirmed so far:
- Dark Souls: Remastered
Dead Cells- FIFA 19
NBA 2K19- Pokemon: Let’s Go Pikachu!
- Pokemon: Let’s Go Eevee!
- Splatoon 2
But I noticed that a bunch of other games have added the phrase “A Nintendo Switch Online membership (sold separately) is required for Save Data Cloud backup,” which suggests that they, at least, will support cloud saves. Here’s that list as well:
- Bayonetta
- Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker
- Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
- Dragon Quest: Builders
- Fire Emblem Warriors
- Flip Wars
- Hyrule Warriors
- Kirby Star Allies
- Octopath Traveler
- Snipperclips
- Snipperclips Plus
- Super Mario Odyssey
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- Xenoblade Chronicles 2
- Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country
I took a look at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to see cached versions of these pages, and it looks both phrases were added as recently as this week.
Ars Technica spotted the news earlier.
Nintendo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Update, 8:57p.m. PT: Weirdly, the “does not support” references have been removed from Dead Cells and NBA 2K19. Perhaps those were listed as a mistake. Also, a Redditor says he or she has put together a script to track these changes on an ongoing basis and discovered more games, which we’ve added. You can check out the Reddit post here.