Here’s When Nintendo Switch Online Will Launch

Today’s the day that Nintendo will flip the, ahem, Switch for its online service for its hit console, enabling fans to play online with one another and partake in classic NES games through a downloadable cloud library. But everyone’s asking when the service will actually kick off.

According to Nintendo, the plan is for later this evening. In fact, the publisher recently took to Twitter to announce that it will be performing maintenance that will take the service offline for a few hours before coming back up this evening around 11 PM EDT. When it does return, that’s likely when Nintendo Switch Online will be activated, so people can give it a try with its seven day trial.

You can see the tweet below. According to what it says, servers will be down starting at 8 PM EDT and will stay down for three hours.

Once it does return, players should be able to hop into the seven-day trial to give the service a shot before investing in a membership, which ranges from $3.99 a month all the way to $19.99 a year. Not exactly a bank-breaker, it should be affordable for those that want to play the likes of Splatoon 2 and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate against others.

And remember, you can use Nintendo Gold points to pay for a subscription if you want to take that route, though you’ll probably still be required to set up a credit card, since the points can’t be used for auto-renewal. Granted, you can try the service out with the trial first and see if it’s worth it, and if you’ll be using the service often.

We’ll let you know once the service is rarin’ to go, but you’ve got a few hours to enjoy Splatoon 2 on the house before everything gets prepped for tonight’s big switch-over.