Yeah, and you can't have two people independently playing Animal Crossing in one single household since you have to expose the Switch as a DMZ host with all ports on your provider's NAT IP forwarded to it. If your provider doesn't offer you a publicly routed IP (aka CGNAT), you're completely out of luck being the host for Animal Crossing.

And even worse, the ruddy thing doesn't even speak UPnP, so you have to do everything manually!

That's appalling. We've gone from running internal on local networks to forcing a potential security issue to allow for multiplayer.

My personal favorite is Microsoft discouraging local Minecraft servers with the rational that anyone could type anything on them! Who knows what you and the people you explicitly allow on your server might type!

But your switch example is worse, I think.

> My personal favorite is Microsoft discouraging local Minecraft servers with the rational that anyone could type anything on them! Who knows what you and the people you explicitly allow on your server might type!

I do understand where they're coming from, it's brand safety 101 - they don't want to risk the PR disaster from incompetent parents coming into their child's room and seeing n-bombs dropped into the Minecraft chat, leading to the parents shitstorming Microsoft for not moderating the chats when Microsoft for once isn't responsible for not moderating.

I think that legitimate fear is also why so many games removed self-hosting servers. I can remember from the UT2004 days that there were a lot of questionable things said in online chats... obviously sexism, but also lots and lots of racism and antisemitism.

> I do understand where they're coming from, it's brand safety 101 - they don't want to risk the PR disaster from incompetent parents coming into their child's room and seeing n-bombs dropped into the Minecraft chat

Maybe, I’m misunderstanding the initial statement, but if this were case, why ban local servers and not public, internet accessible servers? I promise there’s a much higher chance of that hypothetical happening on those.

Nintendo has required you to compromise your network security for online play since the DS and Wii. They often required you to set up "DMZ" and port forwarding and still wouldn't work, and the original DS could only do WEP wifi security.

> and the original DS could only do WEP wifi security.

That's excusable though. The DS was released in 2004, with WEP being deprecated only in the same year [1] and most consumer routers / APs of the time not getting updates to WPA anyway.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wired_Equivalent_Privacy

I know Nintendo includes this step in their hole-punching troubleshooting guide, but it's just not necessary. I've never met anybody who needed to do this to get their NAT traversal working, it's worked out of the box for every Switch game I've used for everybody I know. I'm sure there are people with weird or bizarre enough networks that standard STUN techniques don't work, but in my ~4 years of playing switch online games with my friends I've never met any of them.

you assume that Nintendo knows what they're doing, which is pretty bold if I may say.

STUN seems like an important technique to get right for their core business, and should boil down to sending a few UDP packets back and forth with a server. As long as they have a dozen engineers that have a clue, it seems reasonable to expect NAT traversal to just work on a switch in most setups.

I have an AVM FritzBox router with UPnP enabled, easily Germany's most-used and most-loved router model. Everything that uses UPnP works out of the box, but I've never seen the Switch create UPnP rules on its own.

I wonder what the fuck keeps Nintendo from operating their own STUN/TURN servers, at least for their own fucking games where I pay 35€ a year for their online service.