Nintendo Account: Family Groups now live
Last week, Nintendo shared some additional details about its Nintendo Switch Online service, that will start in September. Among the new elements revealed, there’s Family Groups: a group of Nintendo Account holders that can share a Family Membership. Pretty useful when you have kids / siblings / parents, and don’t want to pay for an individual membership.
As announced last week, Family Groups are now live for Nintendo Account holders: simply head over to the Family Group section of the official website. There, you can manage your Family Group, add members to that group, or leave it altogether. If you already have created a Child Account, then that account has already been added to the group.
To invite someone to a Family Group, all you need is their email address and…. that’s pretty much it. You enter their email address on this page, click the submit button, and if the person accepts the invitation, you’re good to go. Of course, that other person does need their own Nintendo Account, but even if they don’t have one yet, it only takes a few minutes to create one.
It doesn’t look like there are any kind of restrictions regarding who you can invite to a Family Group. In other words, you can invite friends in order to share a Family Membership…. you can even invite complete strangers if you really want to (though it’s obviously recommended to stick to people you personally know), or users from a different region (which implies the Family Membership is not region-locked).
On the Family Group Management page, you can select someone to be the group’s admin (by default, it’s the person who created the group), but also remove members (something only the admin can do). Child accounts cannot be removed.
Next, here’s some additional details from the Japanese FAQ:
- as mentioned above, the person who created the Family Group is the Admin;
- you can have up to 8 people in your group, including the Admin and any associated Child Accounts;
- Child Accounts created before May 15th are automatically added to your Family Group;
- you cannot be part of more than one Family Group, at least not with the same account;
- anyone that’s part of the Family Group can subscribe to the Family Membership: it’s not just the Admin that can do so. Also, when someone subscribes to the Family Membership, everyone else in the group automatically benefits from it;
- you can set specified members as Guardian (for Parental Controls). Only members who are at least 18 years old can become one;
- this may seem overly obvious, but Nintendo specifies that members of a Family Group do NOT share Nintendo eShop funds, purchase history, or My Nintendo Points.
About Guardians: when a member becomes one, they can manage Parental Controls for any Child Account in the group. Naturally, they cannot do so for accounts of other Guardians or the Admin’s. Also, all emails addressed to the Child Account (like Nintendo eShop emails) will only reach the person who create it, not the Guardians.
Important note: if nobody in the group is over 18 years old, then they cannot become Guardians.
Source: Nintendo