Lost your Joy-Con? Nintendo’s new Switch firmware will help you find it

By Jon Martindale June 20, 2017

Nintendo Switch review — Mike Epstein/Digital Trends

Nintendo has released firmware version 3.0 for the Nintendo Switch, adding a number of new features, including one that helps find Joy-Cons that have slipped down the side of the couch. It also helps you bring over old friends from your 3DS and Wii U systems, and lets you connect a USB keyboard to make text communication far easier.

Since the Nintendo Switch first debuted in March, Nintendo has released a number of firmware updates that have improved stability and enhanced the user experience. This latest version, 3.0, goes well beyond that, though, and adds a number of exciting and much-requested features.

USB keyboard support is a big one, making it much easier to type to friends or search on the Nintendo store, but it’s far from the only one. You can now remotely enable the Joy-Con vibration feature, making it easy to find them if lost and you can now change the user icon on the Home Menu, with a selection of six new Splatoon 2 characters to choose from, as well as the original options.

Other changes include the ability to adjust the system volume from the quick settings menu, the option to drop the maximum volume for headphone or speakers connected to the audio jack, and a choice of advanced screen color effects, letting you invert what’s on screen, or switch to grayscale.

Further improving its online service, Nintendo has also made it possible to import your friends from lists on the 3DS and Wii U. After applying this latest update, you’ll also receive new notifications when your friends go online, making it easier to connect with them for joint gaming experiences.

To top it all off, this firmware update adds the option to subscribe to certain game feeds and news sources, helping you stay up to date with the latest happenings with your favorite, or most anticipated games.

Your Switch should download the latest firmware update itself, but if it doesn’t, try restarting the system. You can also check which version you’re running in the settings menu, as well as trigger a manual update from there.

If you’re having any other problems with your Switch, check out our handy guide for some of the most common fixes.

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Don’t expect Zelda’s $70 price to become the new Switch standard, says Nintendo

Link looks at his hand in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be Nintendo's first Switch game to be priced at $70. News that Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to one of the bestselling and most critically acclaimed titles on the system, will have an increased price compared to its predecessor came as a surprise over three-and-a-half years after its announcement. It also raised questions about what the future of pricing for Nintendo games will be, especially as Sony, Microsoft, and third-party publishers all upped the cost of their new games in recent years.
While Nintendo will release Tears of Kingdom at $70, a spokesperson for the company tells Digital Trends that this will not always be the case for its first-party games going forward.
"No," the spokesperson said when Digital Trends asked if this is a new standard. "We determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis."
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Official Trailer #2
To get more insight into the price shift, I spoke to Omdia Principal Analyst George Jijiashvili, who explains what has caused the price of games to go up in recent years and how Tears of the Kingdom demonstrates that Nintendo will "remain flexible about first-party title pricing." Ultimately, Nintendo fans are finally starting to feel the impact of inflation that's been sweeping across the game industry, even if it's only "on a case-by-case basis" for now.
The price is right
Nintendo claims that not every one of its significant first-party game will be $70, and we can actually already see that in action. Preorders just went live for Pikmin 4, which launches on July 21, after Tears of the Kingdom, and it only costs $60. Still, Zelda's price tag indicates that going forward, Nintendo will at least consider raising the price of its most anticipated games to $70. But why start with Tears of the Kingdom?
When asked why it chose Tears of the Kingdom as its first $70 Nintendo Switch game, a Nintendo spokesperson simply reiterated that the company will "determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis." Still, it's a surprising choice for Nintendo to make that pricing change to just one exclusive game almost six years into the Switch's life span. Jijiashvili thinks the choice to do this with Tears of the Kingdom was a pretty apparent one for Nintendo, although it won't apply to everything going forward.
"If you are going to make a game $70, it's going to be the follow-up to one of your most critically acclaimed and bestselling games ever," Jijiashvili tells Digital Trends. "I don’t think that this means that $70 will become the standard price for all major Nintendo releases. It's worth noting that Metroid Prime Remastered is priced at $40. It's clear that Nintendo will remain flexible about first-party title pricing."

It makes basic financial sense for Nintendo to ask for a little bit more for a game it knows will be one of the biggest releases of 2023. But what factors in the game industry and world's economy at large caused Nintendo to make this decision?
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For more than a decade, people got comfortable with AAA video games being priced at $60. Of course, there were occasional exceptions to this rule, but it was seen as an industry standard until the dawn of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Publisher 2K was one of the first to announce a price increase, and companies like EA, Sony, and Microsoft have all followed suit. Jijiashvili chalks this up to inflation-related pressure on game publishers.
"The games industry has already been experiencing a lot of inflationary pressure," he explains. "AAA games are much more expensive to make now than they used to be, but prices have actually been declining in inflation-adjusted terms -- if prices had risen with inflation since 1990, they would now be over $90. On top of that, we’ve had a big burst of general inflation, meaning that publishers are looking at big increases in everything from salaries to tools. It’s going to be really hard for most publishers to avoid passing on all those extra costs at some point."
Jijiashvili provided us with a graphic created by Omdia that "shows what the typical price points for each generation would look like if you adjusted for inflation." As you can see, the inflation-adjusted prices are only exponentially growing, and the big game pricing shifts the graph highlights were all technically not even enough to keep up with inflation when they happened.

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Nintendo's historically under-supported mobile app is primarily used as a tool for players who want to use voice chat in games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. For Splatoon 3, however, it has several other purposes -- some of which allow players to earn exclusive gear not found in the game itself.

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