Nintendo confirms you will have to pay to use the Switch 2’s C button

Nintendo has made its own Discord-like chat app for the Switch 2, and it’s going to charge you for it. Once the free period is over on March 31, 2026, GameChat, and the C button that activates it, will require a Nintendo Switch Online (NSO) membership.

So what happens if you aren’t a subscriber and press the C button? Not much, vice president of player and product experience Bill Trinen told Polygon in a recent interview.

“You would be able to find out about the NSO subscription there and get a sense of some of the functionality,” he said.

Presumably, this is how you’d learn that GameChat works a lot like Discord video chat works on PC. You can talk with your friends in handheld or docked mode via a built-in microphone and stream your gameplay to each other. There’s even a camera you can buy to overlay onto your stream, or just to chat face-to-face.

But unless you have an active NSO membership, you’ll have a whole button dedicated to nothing on your Switch 2. It doesn’t even sound like you can remap it to something else. It will just be a reminder of the $19.99 you may or may not be handing to Nintendo every year.

Trinen says the C button has a price tag because GameChat is “part of the overall platform experience” and that “NSO really is a critical piece of the Nintendo Switch 2 experience.” He listed off some of the new Switch 2-exclusive benefits, like access to old GameCube games and free upgrades to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

That subscription fee will be on top of a console that’s already going to cost you $449.99 — or possibly more if U.S. President’s Trump’s tariffs prompt Nintendo to increase it. We won’t know if GameChat will prove to be worth it until the Switch 2 releases in June.