GameChat is like if you had to pay for Discord, but it was also less useful.

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 and ad-shaped “quests,” but Discord remains the king of voice and video sharing.

With GameChat, revealed as one of the Switch 2’s biggest selling points during a recent Nintendo Direct presentation, expectations were high. Unfortunately, it seems to fall short of its potential.

Nintendo’s GameChat adopts a visual layout reminiscent of Discord but lacks the functionality that makes the latter popular, including the quality of audio and video communication. The expectation is that users will communicate using a microphone embedded in the console, and during demonstrations, it has been noted that the voice quality may not be optimal, particularly in noisy environments.

This new chat service presents itself as a less capable alternative to existing, more established platforms, raising questions about its appeal to the gaming community.

Watch the demo here: Nintendo Direct GameChat Screenshot