Pretendo Switch Online

zDavid · April 18, 2026, 5:12pm

This is what @PN_Jon said:

When will Switch servers come out for Pretendo?

We have no current intentions of providing any custom NSO servers at this time, for a number of reasons:

NSO is a paid service, whereas Nintendo Network is not. NSO is also still being used on Nintendo’s flagship consoles. Both of these factors give Nintendo a MUCH higher incentive to take legal action against high-profile NSO alternatives (of which we would be, considering we’re already on their radar as it is). Making an alternative to NSO would, at best, be seen as directly taking away revenue from Nintendo, which is a legal case we do not wish to get near. At worst, if we continue to take donations while providing an NSO alternative, it could be argued that we are directly profiting by taking away revenue from Nintendo, which is incredibly worse

Nintendo severely increased their console security with the Switch/Switch 2. It is much harder to hack the original Switch family than really any other Nintendo console to date, not including the Switch 2 which has no known weaknesses at all. That makes the install base rather small, and likely not worth the time at the moment. I doubt we’d ever get an SSSL (hackless) sort of method on the Switch/Switch 2, considering how Nintendo improved things

Nintendo became much more serious about their online infrastructure when moving the NSO. Before NSO, Nintendo just iterated on themselves and reused portions of their previous networks for their then current ones. You can still find traces of the Wii online services on NN, for example. With NSO, they completely started from scratch, and improved it in a lot of ways. NSO is much more complex than Nintendo Network, which is already much more complex than Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. So it would take a considerable amount of work to implement. Additionally, Nintendo is much less forgiving when it comes to custom clients and fuzzing their servers. The way we find out information about Nintendo Network is often by sending intentionally bad/unexpected data to the servers and seeing how it responds. Nintendo is now closely watching this behavior, and will aggressively ban consoles it thinks are trying to do anything funny with their servers. They even go so far as to check the order that HTTP headers are sent in. That makes it MUCH more dangerous for us to even research things, not to mention more dangerous for users to use replacement services should we create any inaccuracies

While Nintendo did use the same game server software (NEX) for early Switch 1 games as they did on the Wii U/3DS, and we have developed all of our tools to be compatible with these Switch games, due to the issues surrounding research not much is known about the specifics of the NSO version of these libraries. Additionally, Nintendo stopped using NEX years ago and moved to a new set of tools called NPLN. Trying to support NSO properly would mean doubling our workload to now maintain both NEX libraries, and NPLN libraries, and the games that come with them

This might be the most important one, but we have NO WAY to track consoles on NSO. On Nintendo Network, the Wii U and 3DS each have a unique file called the “device certificate” that is cryptographically signed by Nintendo at the factory, and is uniquely tied to that console. No one is able to create new device certificates, since only Nintendo has the private key. But the public key is public, which means we can validate these signatures. This is how we track consoles, and are able to issue console bans that cannot be bypassed without a whole new console. This system is INTEGRAL to our services security, since without it cheaters and other bad actors could freely rejoin without issue. The Switch does NOT have a system like this. Instead, Nintendo gives each console a unique SSL certificate. These certificates are issued by a Nintendo-controlled CA, and are what grants access to the NSO servers. Without a valid SSL certificate, you can’t connect to begin with. For a NSO replacement service, you would need to get around this SSL verification, which means that any SSL certificate could access the replacement servers. And it’s not currently possible to validate the SSL certificate the way we can a device certificate, since we don’t have Nintendo’s private SSL certs/keys

We’ve discussed the idea in the past and have decided that, as of now, it is not feasible to go in that direction. Especially so long as NSO is still online and remains a paid service, and so long as we have no way to securely issue console bans. As of right now, the most we would likely do is just partner with some other NSO service, should a trustworthy/safe one ever exist (but I sort of doubt that right now).