Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 will gain eShop gifting on November 17 — but only within family groups, not to friends or strangers. The feature arrives via system update Ver. 23.5.0, which is already live on both consoles globally. The eShop update itself rolls out separately, one week later. It’s the first time Nintendo has enabled digital gifting on either platform.
And it’s tightly restricted: only accounts linked under a single Nintendo Account family group (max eight people) can send or receive gifts. No friend-list gifting. No cross-account transfers. No anonymous gifting.
No gifting to supervised accounts, those remain locked out entirely. Eligible items include select games, DLC, and upgrade packs. Nintendo says some products won’t qualify, though it hasn’t published a list. There’s also a hard cap on how many digital gifts you can send in a given period, unspecified, but enforced.
Gifts deliver instantly upon purchase. No scheduling. No draft mode. No take-backs.
This isn’t Steam. It isn’t PlayStation Store. It’s Nintendo: cautious, controlled, and built around household boundaries. The update also includes unspecified ‘general adjustments and fixes’, no crash reports cited, no performance tweaks named, no UI changes detailed.
Just quiet polish. For holiday shoppers eyeing Switch 2 bundles or last-minute eShop top-ups, the timing is deliberate: November 17 lands three weeks before Christmas. But don’t assume your cousin in Mumbai or your college roommate in Austin qualifies as a ‘family group member’. They don’t, unless you’ve already set up a shared Nintendo Account family.
That setup step is required before gifting unlocks. So if you haven’t done it yet, do it now. The eShop update goes live Monday, November 17.
GDFiled by The Games Desk
Consoles, handhelds, PC gaming and the platforms and hardware behind them.
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