You can watch but you can’t broadcast
Today — several yearsafter its debut— the Nintendo Switch now has a Twitch app.
The live-streaming platform has a free 31MB app for the Switch, and you candownload it herefrom the Nintendo eShop. You can watch streams, VODs, clips, and browse on your Switch in handheld or docked mode — but you can’t broadcast. There’s also a chat caveat.
Instead of watching a stream and interacting with chat at the same time on your Switch, the Twitch app relegates chat features to a smartphone “companion experience.”
As explained in this FAQ(along with other details about the lack of broadcasting and Bit-gifting), here’s how to access chat in the Nintendo Switch Twitch app:
In other words, there’s some give-and-take, and it’s been a long time coming, but the Switch has Twitch. Even without feature parity, I feel like the app will have uses in certain situations where people have a Switch handy but not necessarily other devices or screens.
Just in case you’re curious about the state of media apps on Nintendo Switch these days (but not so curious that you want to bother searching around): the console also hasYouTube,Hulu,Funimation, andPokémon TV. So yeah — still no Netflix.
