So, in case you don't know, I am a Hongkonger. And I live in Hong Kong. Funnily enough, |my Nintendo account has been stuck in the US basically since launch.|
The Nintendo Switch is almost a decade old at this point. I crossed the line to becoming an adult during this time. This happened before I had ways to spend money online without asking parents, and I don't like asking my parents for buying games (cuz they would most certainly say no). For the most part, I'm a physical game buyer. I very rarely need to buy anything digital.
Until I was forced to get digital.
Back then, I wanted to buy the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate DLC bundle to play with my friends. Since I couldn't ask my parents for credit card info, I went for the next logical thing I could get: |gift cards|.
I don't remember if Nintendo account didn't support Hong Kong as a region back then, or I was just stupid. I for some reason went for US gift cards (they are buyable in Hong Kong, if you know where to find them ;>).
It was fine.
Nothing went wrong.
Me and my friends had a great time playing it.
Later on, Nintendo added support for Hong Kong as account regions (or I figured out that had been an option since the start). So I tried to switch my accounts region back to HK. Nintendo says, "You have outstanding funds in your account" and refused to change it for me.
Turns out, IN THE US ONLY, if you still have funds in your Nintendo account, you cannot change your account region to outside the US. Because gift cards are only available in amounts of like $5, $10, $50, there tends to be some money left after buying online, mainly due to every price tag ending in $.99.
Sounds like a big issue, but it actually doesn't really matter. You can still play your games on the Nintendo Switch normally (thank god it's not region locked like the Wii U or 3DS). Occasionally I will miss out on some Hong Kong deals, for example "600HKD for 2 games" has happened twice.
I still found that annoying though, because I couldn't use any Hong Kong payment methods to buy from eShop (I was an adult at this point), so I did try to fix it twice.
One day, I decided to contact Nintendo customer support to see if they can help me out with the account region issue. I swear, |they have the best customer support on Earth|. They actively try to help you (which most customer support should do), and they don't try to scam you in the process. Main issue though, is that they only start working at 9 P.M. for me because they are in the US, and I'm in HK.
The first time I did it, they actually fixed it for me. The only info I remember giving them was the serial number of my Nintendo Switch. My account was back to Hong Kong for a while.
With me being the careless idiot however, I switched it back to US to check out something in Splatoon 3. Then I realized I couldn't switch it back again, so after a while, I contacted their customer support again.
This time, things didn't go as smoothly as last time. They said they couldn't fix it for me, and I will have to contact their US office via phone call.
2 problems here:
So I just ditched the process, and left the issue unsolved again.
Today, I was trying to fix my Splatoon 3 stat uploader after the Nintendo Switch Online App updated to v3.0.1. For some reason, it kept yelling "Communication Error". I still haven't managed to fix it as of now, but that was when my brain triggered this memory about the region issue. Suddenly, I thought to myself, "What if I simply spend all the money?"
At this point, I had $7.71 left in my account, which you can see why it is nasty to get rid of. I decided to just take a look at the game catalog to see if I can somehow spend them all. Cue the "Nintendo Switch has games" meme, because when I filtered the games by price between $0 - $4.99, there were almost 10k games.
As we all know, |the eShop is filled with shovelware at this point.| The moderation is broken and there are way too many games to find anything actually fun to play. Some of them is on sale though.
And that's where this became possible.
Because some of these games are on sale, they no longer end with $.99 but something random like $.34. By finding some combination that gets rid of the $.71 part of my funds, I managed to spend all of those money on some stupid games.
Just like that, my account's region is fixed!
