Nintendo Switch now lets you make longer tweets, though it didn’t make much of an impact on Japanese audience

Publication date of the original Japanese article: 2021-09-16 13:23 (JST)
Translated by. Ryuki Ishii

The latest firmware update (13.0.0) for Nintendo Switch includes Bluetooth audio support and “Maintain Internet Connection in Sleep Mode” among other new features. What we didn’t notice at first, is the change made to the character limit of Twitter integration. Although it was not mentioned in the patch note, GameXplain noticed the silent update. Simply put, you can now make longer tweets from Nintendo Switch.

Back in 2017, Twitter’s character limit for single-byte character sets changed from 140 to 280. However, the character limit for Nintendo Switch’s Twitter function remained the same (meaning, 140) until now. The users of /r/NintendoSwitch subreddit have been asking for 280-character support for a long time, and now, after nearly 4 years, Nintendo has finally addressed the issue.

Many Nintendo Switch users are rejoiced by the change, and you can see their enthusiastic reactions on Twitter. However, the reactions from Japanese users were modest at best. This is because the change applies to single-byte characters only. Tweet limit for multi-byte characters like Japanese has always been 140 ever since the inception of Twitter, so the latest firmware update didn’t make as big of an impact as it did on people who mainly use single-byte character sets.

Although Japanese people mainly use multi-byte characters, they mix in single-byte characters as well. So the new update is still a welcoming change.