Before Elon Musk acquired Twitter in late 2022, the social media platform had a robust developer ecosystem filled with third-party companies integrating it into their own products. Musk’s Twitter, now known as X, is a vastly different environment for developers.
Case in point: As of Monday, June 10, 2024, all of the major video game consoles – Nintendo Switch, Sony Playstation, and Microsoft Xbox – have officially removed X / Twitter integrations from their products.
X loses major gaming companies
In April 2023, Microsoft was the first video game console manufacturer to announce that it was removing its X integration from Xbox consoles.
In November of that same year, Sony followed suit and announced that it would also be removing X integration from its Playstation consoles.
Since then, Nintendo has had the only major video game console on the market with X integration. But, just last month, Nintendo announced that it too had decided to drop its X integration from its Switch console.
On Monday, June 10, Nintendo officially removed its X integrations in its Nintendo Switch 18.1.0 update.
X integrations removed from Nintendo Switch
“The following updates were made for the discontinuation of X (formerly Twitter) integration,” Nintendo wrote in the update notes, listing what has been removed.
According to Nintendo, in removing the X integration, users will no longer be able to choose the “Post to Twitter” option when sharing from the Album in the Nintendo Switch HOME menu. The option to link to X under “Posting to Social Media” in the User Settings menu has also been removed.
Finally, a specific X integration for the game Super Smash Bros. Ultimate which allowed users to post screenshots from their gameplay directly to X has been removed as well.
Why did Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft drop X?
Neither Nintendo, Sony, nor Microsoft has explicitly stated why they removed X integrations. However, these companies all moved to drop X support from their consoles after Musk changed up the pricing tiers for X’s API access.
API access is required for these integrations to work. Before Musk acquired the company, then-Twitter provided a generous free API tier for third-parties building services that utilized the social media platform.
However, under Musk, X has made the free API tier practically useless, and started charging exorbitant fees for access to the company’s usable API. Musk’s new API pricing plans start at $42,000 per month for Enterprise API access, which is what companies like Nintendo would require.
Based on their customer base, it’s very likely that Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony found that they’d need to pay out at least hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to X in order to simply let their users post gaming content directly from the console to social media.
Posting from the company’s official @XGaming account, Musk’s X claims to have worked with Nintendo regarding the integrations, but Nintendo decided to remove them anyway.
Tweet may have been deleted
“We worked together with Nintendo throughout this process to ensure API access for this integration, but ultimately it was a product decision made by Nintendo,” the @XGaming post reads.
Gamers who still want to share content to X will need to save their gameplay screenshots or footage, and then transfer them to their computer or mobile device before posting to X.