Twelve months after launch, some Nintendo Switch owners are discovering that their data relating to total playtime logged on games played a year ago are gone. Games played on or prior to the console’s launch date of March 2, 2017 had their playtime counts reset to 0, which seems to indicate the Switch was only tracking months and specific day players first fired a game up, and not the year. The good news is, if this is an issue that’s affecting your Switch, everything’s fine. Don’t panic, sit tight, the numbers are a bit bung on the front end right now but everything’s a-OK behind the scenes.
So what exactly is the problem? For those of you that rushed out and grabbed a Switch and Breath of the Wild on launch day, you may now find that your Switch is telling you that the first time you played the game was about five days ago. This is quite clearly not the case and for those of you who, like us, have poured hundreds of hours into the game, you might think such an error is cause for concern.
Not to worry though, Nintendo have been in touch with multiple outlets covering this story overnight and have confirmed that the problem is merely a bug in the software causing the playtime data to display incorrectly. Your total playtime data has not been deleted and your Switch is still happily recording that data, it’s just not displaying it properly.
Nintendo of America was quick to address the problem on Twitter, stating that the issue was affecting “some Nintendo Switch owners’ play activity” and that it would be resolved in a future system update.
Some Nintendo Switch owners’ play activity info is displaying incorrectly, but play activity is still being recorded accurately in the background. A future system update will resolve this issue & ensure play time data is correctly displayed. We apologize for the inconvenience.
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) March 5, 2018
So there you go. Nintendo haven’t given a date for resolution at this point but we would anticipate a fairly quick turnaround given the traction this story has been picking up online.
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