Let’s be real – June belongs to the Nintendo Switch 2. It’s the biggest console launch in ages, and is highly likely to do insane early sales numbers once it’s all been tallied in a few months’ time, and people feverishly try to upgrade from their first-generation Switch consoles.
Whether you’ve got an OLED model or a launch Switch (or even a Switch Lite), you might be curious as to how the upgrade process actually works, and in particular, whether you can transfer games from your old console to the Switch 2. I’ve gone through the process now, so can confirm exactly how it works.
Can I transfer games to the Switch 2?
(Image credit: Future)
If this is what you’re wondering, it’s worth rewinding to explain how the transfer process works more widely.
When you set up your Switch 2 for the first time, after logging into your Nintendo Account, you’ll see the option to transfer data from another console. At this point, you can use your Switch 1 to start the transfer process from the Settings menu.
This transfer brings across your accounts, your saved games, your purchased digital game licenses, system settings, screenshots and videos, and parental controls. That all happens in one go and takes a few minutes to wirelessly complete (or longer if you have a lot of videos saved).
Something I should point out here is that you only get the chance to do this system transfer while setting up your Switch 2 for the first time – it’s not available later in the settings menu. So, don’t miss your chance to do it, or you’ll have to factory reset your Switch 2 to get another shot at it.
Once that’s done, though, the Switch 2 will be ready to use, with one big caveat. Whatever games you had stored on your Switch 1 will not be ready to play – they’ll need to be redownloaded before they can work. This doesn’t apply to games you own on cartridge, of course, but any digital games will start to download right away.
One thing to note here is that if you have a microSD card in your Switch 1 and therefore have more games stored than the Switch 2 can handle on its 256GB of internal storage, you’ll need to step in at this point. I had to cancel a whole heap of downloads, as the console was trying to download every game I had on my old 1TB microSD card.
What about using a microSD card?
(Image credit: Future / Mike Lowe)
If you do indeed have a microSD card in your Switch 1, you might assume that you can just pop it into the Switch 2 and play games from it. Sadly, that won’t work – because Nintendo has moved to the new microSD Express cards for the newer console.
We have a whole explainer of these new cards right here, to walk you through the benefits, although right now it feels like a slightly harsh upgrade given the elevated prices of cards compared to standard microSD.
Do I keep my saved games?
As mentioned earlier, the transfer process will bring your saved games over to your new console, and in most cases it’ll also leave them behind on the old one. That’s convenient, but it comes with an asterisk – some do get deleted.
When I moved my data over, the old Switch let me know that a short list of games wouldn’t be able to leave their saves behind. I have them on my Switch 2, so that’s no problem, but they were not preserved on the old hardware.
Launch games to test them
(Image credit: Future)
We’re not sure exactly what’s going on here, but a couple of different T3 team members have reported one small hiccup while setting up their Switch 2 consoles. After completing the transfer and being logged in all correctly, they found that the first time they launched games they occasionally were made to log in again through the online verification system.
This isn’t a big deal, and hasn’t recurred since for either of them, but it did mean another online login – so if you’re going to head off for portable play the moment your Switch 2 is set up, consider delaying that long enough to launch each downloaded game once, quickly.
This will let you double check that you’re not required to login again, and that everything will work smoothly.
