The Nintendo Switch 2 was officially announced, with upgrades to graphical performance, as well as a fair bit of emphasis on online voice chat. By extension, the latter extends to the Switch Online subscription. All of this can be quite finicky when we don’t have our own eShop region, and have been bypassing this by tying our account to other regions, such as the US. Though it looks like the company is finally addressing the lack of support in the Southeast Asia region.
In a page posted to the official Malaysian website, the company says that “we are working to launch online services, including Nintendo Switch Online and the Nintendo eShop in these four countries”. This is referring to Malaysia, Singapore Thailand and the Philippines. A link to this page has been posted to the company’s official Southeast Asia page as well.
It’s about time, too. The company first indicated that it would be having an official presence in the SEA region back in 2021, with the launch of its Singaporean website. It would then take under half a year for the Malaysian counterpart to be set up, but from that point on, things sort of went into limbo. It did appoint Convergent Distribution Sdn. Bhd as its official distributor for the Switch in October of 2023, for what it’s worth.
But with the good news also comes some bad ones. In the aforementioned web page, the company says that the Nintendo Switch 2 will only be releasing in SEA between July and September, as opposed to the 5 June date announced during the Direct. No price has been revealed either, and we’ll probably have to wait until we enter the second half of the year to find out. Indonesia is possibly not included in the list because of the country’s policy of requiring companies to have invested in the country for their products to be sold domestically.
(Source: Nintendo)
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