One of the Switch 2's biggest innovations is 'Discord but worse'

There's a reason Discord is the default chat app when you want to play games with friends. It's easy to set up, latency is low, audio quality is often excellent, and oh yea, it's free. Say what you will about its occasionally irritating updates, ad-shaped "quests", and its overuse as a replacement for traditional forums (and we will), but Discord is the undisputed king of voice and video sharing.

Discord is so good that, slowly but surely, both Microsoft and Sony have embraced the app on their consoles despite launching their own, much worse options for voice chat. We all could have guessed that Nintendo, the undisputed king of disappointing online features, wasn't going to welcome Discord onto its closed platform with the Switch 2.

But I expected something better than GameChat, a Switch 2-exclusive chat service that, as far as I can tell, is Discord if every aspect of it was worse.

GameChat was revealed as one the Switch 2's biggest selling points during yesterday's Nintendo Direct. It was the first thing shown off after the announcement of Mario Kart World and chewed up a whole five minutes as Nintendo walked through its functionality. When I say GameChat is "like Discord," what I really mean is Nintendo has lifted the chat app's entire visual language for group calls: Users appear as colored rectangles with their avatars at the center, neatly grouped in a grid. From a distance, a GameChat call just looks like a Discord server full of Nintendo fans, which means it looks nice.

The wincing begins when Nintendo explains that the microphone it expects you to chat with is not an included headset nor a built-in mic in the controller a la PS5 Dualsense, but a tiny mic hole drilled into the top of the Switch 2 console itself. Yes, that Switch 2 console sitting a good five to six feet away from the dude in this example:

Despite what every interaction with a tinny, echoey, conference room-style speakerphone has taught us, Nintendo insists your friends' voices will come through crystal clear via the onboard mic. And background noise? Noise-canceling tech will take care of it, including the sound of your roommate operating a blender at full blast two feet behind the couch.

That's all fine and good, except that we can hear what GameChat sounds like in the demonstration video, and charitably, it's ass—voices have that distant, bass-less, helicopter pilot quality you'll recognize if you've ever suffered through a call with an AirPods user on a windy day. It's acceptable in a pinch, especially if GameChat truly can cut out a noisy background blender, but for hours-long gaming sessions, we can do a lot better these days than the crackly walkie-talkie voice chat of Xbox Live circa 2006.

Presumably, the Switch 2 will support headsets in some form, but it looks like you'll have to buy a new Pro Controller to get a 3.5mm audio passthrough port (a feature non-Nintendo consoles have had with their included controllers for over a decade).

Unfortunately, third-party peripherals won't save us from GameChat's true deficiency: Screen sharing. On Discord, screen sharing is nothing short of a miracle. With two mouse clicks, you can start a live stream of any game or window on your PC to an unlimited number of people for an unlimited amount of time. The video delay is less than a second, so unlike watching your buddy stream on Twitch, Discord screen sharing really feels like you're sitting on the same couch.

That's the idea of GameChat's screen sharing as well, but while free Discord users can stream at 30fps and 720p (through PC, mobile, Xbox, or PS5), GameChat screen sharing looks like this:

To be clear, the smooth top feed is the local player's screen. The bottom boxes—the ones that look like low-res gifs that never end—are GameChat screen share.

If GameChat were the leap in online communication that Nintendo frames it as, I'd call its bizarrely choppy video streams a reasonable limitation. But Discord has been doing this exact feature on more platforms and better for years. GameChat is a step up from the Switch 1's laughably terrible mobile-only chat app, but like every Nintendo attempt to catch up with online play, it's still several steps behind what the rest of us are using. Even if GameChat audio and video were on par, it's still locked to this one ecosystem of friends, whereas Discord lets you keep up with the same crowds no matter the device.

It's a good thing GameChat is a free perk of the $450 console! Wait, you're telling me you can only GameChat with a $20 Switch Online Membership? Man, just download Discord.