Nintendo Fixing Switch's Playtime Glitch With An Update

This past weekend marked the first anniversary of the Nintendo Switch, but the celebration was dampened for many Switch owners when they discovered the system had begun seemingly resetting their play times. Fortunately, the issue appears to be temporary, and Nintendo has announced an update is on the way to resolve it.

"Some Nintendo Switch owners' play activity info is displaying incorrectly, but play activity is still being recorded accurately in the background," Nintendo said on Twitter. "A future system update will resolve this issue [and] ensure play time data is correctly displayed. We apologize for the inconvenience."

The play time glitch was first reported just prior to the console's first birthday. Many early adopters had discovered that any titles they had started playing on the system's launch day, such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, now displayed that they were first played "0 days ago" in their Switch profile, leading many to fear that the system was only keeping track of users' play activity for one year.

Fan publication NF Magazine later reported on Twitter that play times aren't reset permanently, but rather disappear for 10 days--the same amount of time it normally takes for your play activity to show up in your Switch profile. After day 11, your play time would begin displaying again normally. This is certainly good news for players who enjoy having a record of how long they've spent playing each of their Switch games.

Switch celebrated its first anniversary on March 3, enjoying one of the best debut years of any console. You can relive the system's early successes (and a few areas where it can still be improved) in our look back on Switch's great first year. As successful as the console has been so far, Nintendo reportedly doesn't have plans yet to release a new version of the console yet this year.