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Discussion Dear Nintendo: Please let me purchase digital games and DLC as gifts for other people.

Derachi

Fresh Eater
Founder
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The Nintendo Switch eShop has literally thousands and thousands of games. If I wanted to purchase a game as a gift for someone, my options right now are

1) purchase a digital code and send it to them

2) hope there's a physical copy that is not out of print or too expensive

There simply has to be a better way, and in fact there is. Nintendo has previously solved this problem on the Wii Shop Channel: the ability to purchase games as gifts for other people. I cannot think of a good reason this hasn't been implemented yet. I get there are probably tax reasons or something, but I would be more than OK to have it limited to people within your own region.

Would you be interested in the ability to buy games/DLC as gifts for other people on the eShop?
 
It’s honestly pretty bizarre that the eShop doesn’t support gifting. Like, you’d think the one thing Nintendo would be clearly motivated to do is to make it easy for people to buy games.
 
Yeah I think it would be a great feature, especially during a sale when it's affordable to gift someone a game you think they'd love!
 
Tbh I wonder if this is something they do for retailers sake.

I've purchased many a game code for others, but that isn't an option for every title
 
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Omg that would be fantastic. I would have avoided all my Best Buy digital drama for Splatoon 3 for my daughter if that was an option because I wanted it to be a surprise for her for release day to have it just show up on her Switch.
 
I was just thinking about this recently. I would love to have this feature and it's bizarre it's not a thing.

Even on Wii it was flawed though. I remember having to switch my Wii's region just to send my friend in Canada a Virtual Console game. Don't know why it wouldn't be a globally allowed thing. I guess I could understand it for region-specific games but this was a Virtual Console game any region could play.
 
I only just discovered recently that this wasn’t a thing. On Xbox I have often gifted games on sale, so when my cousin finally bought a switch I tried to buy him some games and was stunned that I couldn’t. I just cannot understand why they don’t allow it.
 
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Also add shopping cart. And let me change the ugly orange to black. And let me rate games at least on the level of the 3ds eshop.
 
It's very likely that this has to do with regional pricing and/or third parties.

Some of them get very angsty about the possibility someone might use gifting to buy games on regions where they're cheaper (As we've seen with Steam locking down cross-region gifting a LOT in the last couple years.)

That said, there's always buying download codes for other people. I've done that a couple of times.
 
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Steam has obviously been doing this for years and it’s super cool. I used to be involved in the Steam community for another gaming forum, and I’d say 50% of the activity in those community threads was people gifting games to each other.

Shoutout to the Penny Arcade Steam community. Those were good times.
 
I usually buy people a gift card and then say download this game, but it’d be 1000% better if you could gift directly especially when games go on sale and you can lock in better prices.
 
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Gifting and refunds are two areas where Nintendo and Sony have a ways to go before catching up to Xbox and Steam.
 
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