It’s a big day for Switch 2 hopefuls. Pre-orders finally went live in America after landing a last-minute delay, and today’s the day that the pre-order lottery winners are announced in Japan. While the former has already seen consoles appear on eBay at ridiculous prices, the latter has broken the region’s My Nintendo Store.
Japanese customers hoping to get their hands on a Switch 2 should be notified today whether they successfully passed the My Nintendo Store lottery and now have a chance to place their pre-order. This notification should come through by email, but with so many fans desperate to find out the results early, the MNS website has seen a huge influx of traffic and has subsequently entered maintenance mode.
As brought to our attention on Twitter by @Genki_JPN, Nintendo posted to the social media platform at 5am BST / 1pm JST announcing that the My Nintendo Store was currently not in service while the team performed emergency maintenance. Two hours later, the issue still wasn’t fixed, with Nintendo apologising “for the continued inconvenience” (via Google Translate) in a follow-up post.
At the time of writing (five hours since the maintenance was first reported), the Japanese My Nintendo Store is still down, with fixes apparently ongoing.
This high demand follows yesterday’s statement from Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa, which revealed the MNS would not be able to satisfy Switch 2 demand in Japan at launch. “We received an extremely large number of applications, approximately 2.2 million people in Japan alone,” the statement read, “However, this number far exceeds our expectations, and far exceeds the number of Nintendo Switch 2 consoles that can be delivered from the My Nintendo Store on June 5th”.
While the company made clear that “a significant number of customers will not be selected” in the MNS lottery as a result of this high demand, that clearly hasn’t stopped hopefuls from trying.
