Christmas Day Switch Owners Get Some Naughty with Their Nice

While Nintendo released its newest portable console, the Switch, well away from the Christmas buying season, it remains one of the hottest presents for that particular holiday. Indeed, the Switch was one of the top-sellers on Black Friday. Now imagine the shift in emotion on a person’s face from joy to seeing they got it, to annoyance that there’s some start-up and finally to outright fury upon learning that the eShop is down.

While Nintendo does offer its game as physical editions, a good deal of promotion and marketing has been put toward digital distribution. This means that many new Switch owners, who may have also received gift cards loaded with currency for the Nintendo eShop, are left waiting around for the service to return to normal operation. Owners who decided to hold a staring contest with the unloading service were eventually greeted with a prompt indicating an error, code “2811-7504,” and advising the user to look on Nintendo’s Support Website for troubleshooting information.

After multiple reports and tweets inquiring into the eShop’s status flooded social media, Nintendo released a tweet at 7:50 a.m. merely indicating that the company was apologizing for the eShop problem and that it was looking to resolve the issue as soon as possible. While Nintendo’s official site for Network Maintenance and Operations confirms the outage, it gives no time table as to when a fix to the issue will be reached nor implemented. Rather, the site merely asks players to try the eShop again at a later time.

Of the nearly 600 current and eminent titles on the portable console, 57 of them are exclusives and 4 are Nintendo exclusives like “Super Mario Odyssey” and “Arms.” The Switch does not feature region-locking, allowing North American gamers to play Japanese and European titles and so forth. The console features 32 GB of storage, allowing players to access games through a cartridge, famously treated with a bittering agent to discourage pets and small children from swallowing them, the console’s hard drive or a microSDXC card slotted into the Switch. In a move toward equality between physical games and their digital counterparts, the pricing of Switch games is the same in both forms. Lastly, while the Switch is the first portable console, Nintendo’s GameCube console was designed with portability in mind, as evidenced by the inclusion of a circular handle at the back of the machine’s frame.