The Nintendo Switch Voice Chat Solution Seems Really Clumsy

Third-party product manufacturer HORI has just revealed the design for a Nintendo Switch headset on Twitter, and the reaction has been… Well, it’s been mixed, we’ll just say that. The headset itself looks really cool, and it’s inspired by the style and fresh vibes of Splatoon 2. We dig that. What’s not so cool is the dongle hub that will apparently need to hang between your Switch, smartphone, and headset to make voice chat possible. Take a look at the tweet below, and we’ll have the pictures in a gallery below so you can get a closer look.

As you can see from the diagram, hypothetically, in order get chatting with your friends while playing online on the Switch you’ll need the Switch itself, with a cable connecting it to a central hub, your smartphone, with a cable connecting it to the central hub, and your headset, with a third cable connecting it to the same central hub.

The center hub will take an input from the Switch in order to receive game audio. It will receive an input from your smartphone in order to enable voice chat, which will (we assume) be handled via Nintendo‘s impending online app. Finally, with your headset plugged into the hub you’ll be able to receive game and voice audio simultaneously while chatting with your buds.

This is not a very elegant solution at all, and almost everyone is up in arms about it. It’s important to keep in mind that HORI is making this product, not Nintendo, but it very likely represents the most efficient solution for receiving game audio while participating in voice chat with your friends. Nintendo hasn’t revealed its online service yet or officially stated how voice chat will work but, you guys, I think we may be looking at it right here.

This is pretty crazy because it means that, in 2017, when you can plug a headset straight into your controller on competing consoles with just one cable, the Switch will force you to create a mess of cables connecting three different devices in order to play and chat with your friends. If there’s a bright side here, we haven’t seen it yet, and your author is an avid and steadfast Nintendo fan.