They're not sending review units

I believe they have stated they are sending out review units but only on launch day, that is what various reviewers have stated like Digital Foundry/Eurogamer but they are also pre-ordering retail units too because I guess they don't have full faith in Nintendo providing those review units.

I think if reviewers are expected to be impressed with the retail units then surely you would want them to review units before launch to add to the hype and increase sales. This feels like a negative situation to me, something about the Switch 2 is not going to impress people, it could be battery life, it could be switch compatibility and/or performance or it could be Switch 2 performance but something feels like it won't be as good as expected.

That makes sense. I guess this time they're not sending review units early because the console can't play anything before june 5 lmao

This is probably a Wii U situation again (the OS didn't had any online functionality before a beefy day one update) but this time it's not just online components that aren't ready.

If that's the case then hopefully future Switch 2 batches will be shipped with that "day 1 firmware" installed.

I'm not sure I see an issue with this, aside from unopened Switch 2 boxes once servers become unavailable. But it does feel strange to have a brick that doesn't work until you do it.

So they not only can brick your console whenever it suits them.... its not functional at launch without a day1 update?
Then they record everything you do or say in chat/live steam, and they require info on you, as well as your phone number to use such.
You have to pay for chat funtion... or a console button on your controller does nothing.
You sign away your rights to sue them, to use it (the switch) as well.

Nintendo are going all in.

All off this feels really anti consumer btw.

Yeah this isn't really an issue, everybody has internet these days and doing a quick 20 second update or whatever isn't going to put the vast majority of gamers off.

What an overblown repeat of a point we just had on another thread.

The non-functionality of the early units in the wild are linked to the Backwards Compatibility feature of the Switch 2 needing a firmware update to function with Switch 1 games.

Pretty sure it's the same to access the Eshop as well. Otherwise, none of them have native Switch 2 physical games to test the actual authenticity of the allegations.

We'll only know for sure on launch if that is the case.

The most annoying thing for me is if you don't use online and the chat feature I'm sure Nintendo will still make sure offline Nintendo Switch 2's operate at the same speed as online Switch 2s as if they didn't offline Switch 2's would be faster which obviously won't happen. So the chat code is probably operating in the background even if you can't use it, consuming power and processing cycles. However I guess this is an issue with most online consoles nowadays but just seems worse being a portable console with limited battery runtime. We shall see how this works out but I'm guessing there won't be any advantage of staying offline even if there should be.

Can't wait.

I haven't seen which countries the Switch 2 is launching in except for Europe, Japan and US but the internet speeds of Africa and the Middle East can be very slow and unreliable. I'm a cheap skate who doesn't do much online gaming so my internet is only 25 Megabits per second but its extremely reliable and always fully at that speed. My mother has a much faster connection at her house but the reliability of it is much worse, I'm guessing she has a horrible contention ratio. Her connection is 150 Megabits. However if you downloading something without a resume feature then mine would be the better connection. If she had a Switch 2 it wouldn't surprise me she had to download it multiple times before she got it.