Nintendo’s promised cloud saves on Switch won’t work for every game

promised cloud-save support.

Nintendo Switch Online’s $20/year cost includes a promise to “save your data online for easy access”—which, for the uninitiated, will be the  way to back up your Switch games’ save data when it launches. Currently, should your Nintendo Switch be lost, stolen, or damaged, your progress in games like and is toast, as you cannot personally back save data up to a hard drive.

(Full system backups can be transferred from one console to another, but not if the host system is too damaged to power on.)

An eagle-eyed member of the ResetERA gaming community noticed on Friday that ‘s newest listing at Nintendo’s official site, for its upcoming “starter pack” version, includes a new piece of warning text: “This game does not support Save Data Cloud backup.” It’s unclear exactly when this text was posted, but a quick Internet search for that exact phrase, limited solely to the nintendo.com domain, brings up the same warning for the following current and upcoming Switch games:

This discovery confirms the bad news that Nintendo hinted to back in May: that “most games” will work with the paid service’s cloud-save feature, which was a nice way of saying that some would not.

Determining a common factor from those games is difficult, especially since a few of them aren’t out yet. If online connectivity is a factor, that doesn’t necessarily explain ‘ issue, since that indie game’s sole online option is a “daily challenge” random-level download. These games also run the gamut of rendering engines, including popular engines like Unreal and smaller-fry options like ‘ fork of Heaps.

Either way, the online-centric action of seems like a strange omission for cloud-save support, in terms of working alongside Nintendo’s own gameplay servers. Nintendo did not immediately answer our questions about the technical reasons these games won’t support cloud saves, nor have they yet offered us a comprehensive list as of press time of any other affected games. We’ve reached out to devs of the listed games in hopes of turning up more information and will update this report should we get a clear answer.

Nintendo was set to host one of its “Nintendo Direct” videos this week, which may have revealed more about the paid Switch Online service. However, that video was delayed in light of a major earthquake that hit Japan this week. The video presentation has yet to be rescheduled.