Nintendo has been receiving a lot of criticisms over the last year for not allowing gamers to take full advantage of the hardware by limiting access to certain kinds of third-party peripherals and features such as voice chat. Well, Nintendo is broadening its partnerships by teaming up with Astro for a brand new headset that will be appearing for the Nintendo Switch later this year.
Astro will be developing high-fidelity audio headsets for the Nintendo Switch that gamers will be able to use with the system, which are based on the Astro A40 line.
Sure some people are jumping out of their chairs in excitement while others are asking exactly what this news is about headsets not working on Switches.
Well, when the system first launched it was notorious for limiting users in how they were able to access accessories on the device. For instance, in the docked mode people couldn’t figure out how to use Bluetooth headsets since it wasn’t made directly available in the firmware. Worse yet is that there didn’t seem to be any easy ways to make use of voice chat.
Some guides ended up popping up over time, with outlets like Toms Guide explaining how gamers could make use of Bluetooth headsets on the Switch when docked by connecting the Turtle Beach Ear Force with the Bluetooth dongle to the back of the Switch’s dock in the spare USB port.
What’s interesting is that iMore had a report on the headset models that worked for the Switch and the ones that did not.
In the list, some of Turtle Beach headsets worked, along with SteelSeries’ Siberia 800, and a couple of Creative sets, along with the PDP Legendary set, and even a few PlayStation headsets. Most surprising is that, initially, the Astro A50 series did not work on the Nintendo Switch, and this goes to as recently as January, 2018.
According to the press release, the Astro A40 line will be made compatible with the Nintendo Switch, presumably both for docked and undocked use.
The press release doesn’t specify in detail if there will be any conditions that will be have to be met to get the headset to work or if it will be plug-and-play. The company has plans on addressing exactly how the new headsets will work on the system and what sort of advantages Nintendo Switch gamers can expect from the new accessories.
The main purpose of the press release was to discuss some of the new speaker tags that are coming out for the A40 headsets in partnership with Nintendo, featuring The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., and Super Mario Bros. 3. The stickers will be demonstrated at PAX East over the course of the weekend in Boston, Massachusetts.
Hopefully, this will help alleviate some of the issues some gamers have with the whole headset conundrum on the Nintendo Switch. It’s a shame Nintendo didn’t account for this before the Switch released, but I suppose for some people it’s better to have proper Bluetooth headset support that’s late than never have it at all.
