Nintendo Switch’s voice chat is complicated—and not in a good way

When Nintendo announced in January that its flagship competitive game Splatoon 2 would use voice chat through an application on your phone, questions arose about just how this would be possible. Now, after months of speculation, we have an answer.

An external modem has been revealed via the Splatoon Japan Twitter account, showing off just how the Nintendo Switch will implement voice chat. 

The modem itself has two wires, one that you connect to your phone and the other to your Nintendo Switch system, so that the audio from the game and the voice chat can be sent to your headset, which also plugs into the modem.

The game’s audio comes from the Nintendo Switch, while the voice chat comes from your phone through an application that will be released sometime in the future. Nintendo has not revealed a specific timeframe for when the application will be launched.

Currently, Splatoon 2 is the only known game that will use voice chat on the Nintendo Switch system, with more games expected to use the service in the future.

With all the technology in the Switch, why did Nintendo not combine it all into one package? In this modern day of gaming, Xbox One and PS4 have headsets connected directly into the console for a streamlined experience. It shouldn’t be that hard for Nintendo to do.

The way that Nintendo is going about voice chat feels clunky and archaic. Let’s hope that it can fix the problem in the future by updating the Switch to allow voice chat through the system itself, instead of an external modem and phone application.