 Alright folks, before I get into the news here and the discussion around it, I want to remind you of a couple giveaways we have going on. The first one is for a Nintendo Switch, an Xbox Series X, or a PlayStation 5, and then the second one is for two copies of Pikmin 3 Deluxe, so you can like the video, comment on the video, subscribe to the channel, hit the bell icon, all that jazz. Go down into the description and there'll be more details on how to enter these giveaways and I wish everyone luck. Alright, so Nintendo has a customer support Twitter account in Japan, and the customer support Twitter account isn't extremely active, but when something comes out it's usually just a little pro tip about taking care of your Switch, something that is just common sense for most of their tweets. But this time around, they put out something that apparently must be a problem, a pretty big problem that is not addressed in any Nintendo documentation and has not been talked about publicly. The Nintendo customer support basically says this, you need to charge your Switch at least once every six months. If the battery isn't charged for a long period of time, it might become impossible to charge it ever again. What they're saying is, you let your Switch collect dust, say it collects dust for 7 months, your Switch might not charge, the battery might be completely toast, and the interesting thing here is I can still pick up my old DS and plug it in and charge it and it'll hold the charge. Now, it's not holding the kind of charge that it held back in its heyday of course, but it holds the charge. This morning, I've never seen put out by any company ever with rechargeable batteries. Yes, there is degradation. There are things like if you keep a lithium ion battery charged at a full charge at all times, basically like leaving your Switch in the dock at all times, it will degrade the battery some. It'll still hold the charge, but it'll degrade it some over time. But usually when a battery is discharged, it degrades much slower. Now you should still charge it here and there, but it can usually bounce back. As an example, let's say you had a brand new car battery. You just put in a car, but then the car breaks down for something else and you let that car sit for like three years. I just actually had this happen. You let the car sit for three years. That battery is completely dead. And then when you go to jump the car, you will jump it with some jumper cables or whatever else, the battery charger, do a quick jump. You'll get at the start, but then it'll quickly die and it'll feel like that battery won't hold a charge. But if you trickle charge that car battery, which means you slowly charge that battery, usually with two amps, one amp or two amps over a course of a number of hours, say 24 to 48 hours. At the end of it, that battery will actually hold that charge again and it'll be like it's brand new. This is just how battery technology works. Just in general, batteries don't just completely die out of nowhere. It takes a lot of time, a lot of use, a lot of wear and tear. So to see that just not using your switch for six months to a year could lead to this is troubling. Now, it's not going to be a problem for me now, but this is going to be an issue for people who worry about the longevity of the platform because when we move on to the next generation or the generation after that or the generation after that, you're going to get to this point where you might not be playing the switch more than once a year. And if you don't remember to charge it or keep it on the dock or whatever, your switch just might not work in handheld anymore. It might literally be only a system that can be used in docked mode. And if you're a Switch Lite owner, you might not be able to use your system without being plugged into a wall. It is very, very strange. Obviously, you'll be able to buy replacement batteries even a number of years down the road. And if you're comfortable taking apart your switch, which I totally am, you can replace the battery and it's not that big of a deal and they're not that expensive. But this is interesting that obviously they have had switches sent into Nintendo that won't hold the charge and they have diagnosed that the reason the battery won't hold the charge is because the switch wasn't in use for, you know, a year or however long, you know, like, hey, when's the last time you charge this thing? Oh, I don't know. Like maybe September last year. Oh, yeah. You know what? You killed the battery by not charging it like one time in the last year. It's a very strange thing because there's been a lot of weird things around charging the Switch. Remember, like it uses USB-C, which is great, but it doesn't adhere to the USB-C protocol for charging, which is not so great. This led to people actually bricking their switches, use the wrong cable as an example because the cable might not adhere or might might add here to the official USB-C spec, but Nintendo was operating outside of that spec. So it would charge the switch with an incorrect voltage, which would then damage the switch, damage the battery, damage the components. And we had this issue with power banks. We had this issue with third-party wall chargers, basically anything that wasn't Nintendo branded, it felt like Nintendo purposely messed with voltages for charging specifically so they could force the sale of their Nintendo branded stuff, which happens. We've seen Apple do this and that's why official Apple branded chargers present less problems over years than third-party ones. But I digress. The point is here that this is another issue with charging that we weren't even aware existed because most of us obviously charge our Switch at least once a year because we're playing games. There's at least one game a year that comes up we want to play. But still, I do, you know, this is just kind of another one of those things that I've never seen them. This isn't the first time Nintendo's had batteries, right? Like they've had batteries. They had the 3DS. The DS, you know, going all the way back to the Game Boy Advance, SP had a rechargeable battery. Switch Pro controllers have rechargeable batteries. But this warning doesn't exist for any of those accessories. It doesn't exist for any of those platforms. It's just the Switch. You have to wonder, this does make me wonder, has Nintendo just cheaped out on the battery to the point that whatever company's making them is just using bad cells. Just using bad, bad cells that degrade quicker than they should. We already know the Switch is cheaped out in other areas using plastic locks instead of metal locks, obviously not fixing the Joy-Con drift issues, stuff like that. Plastic screen instead of glass, although there's a point to plastic because it doesn't shatter, but it does scratch. They had warped docks at launch that were warping Switches. They didn't put padding in the very first edition, the very first run of the docks. So then the rails in there were causing scratches on the screen. We've obviously had a lot of Joy-Con wobble that's still an issue to this day. There's just been a little issue. It's a little issue to kickstand. Like isn't that great of a kickstand at all for the Switch? Like at all. It doesn't balance the Switch well at all. Just a little tiny tap and it'll fall over. Even if you're playing tabletop mode on an airplane, good luck. The airplane has any turbulence, even the smallest bit that the Switch has fallen over if you're doing tabletop. They've had these little design choices that were clearly made to make the system cheaper and easier to get into people's hands for that $299 price point, so they wouldn't have to increase the price. But at the same point, maybe they should have increased it by $50, did a better design, put higher quality metals and products into it, and then we would have less issues. They should have conformed to the USB-C charging spec. There's no reason, like fast or charging or something, to go outside of that spec. The only reason is to make things more difficult. So here we have Nintendo Switch's battery needs to be charged once every six months. Again, not an issue for most of us now. Not going to be an issue for most of us for a while, but if you haven't touched your Switch at all in 2020 because there's been nothing to play, hey, go plug that bad boy in and make sure it gets a full charge on that battery, alright? Alright, if you're waiting for age of calamity, don't wait and then don't charge your Switch until just the day you buy it because it might not charge. Kind of a strange issue. Come on, Nintendo. You're better than this. I know you're better than this, but what are you going to do?