The issue is that the kid wants to play a game with his friends.
So that is "online" in the sense that it uses the internet.. but it isn't the same as a web browser, or an open store of every online app.
I run game servers for my nephew. I know he only adds his friends and I can keep a loose eye on them. I don't care if his friends talk about boobs or make penis jokes (they're 14), I only care that there aren't any predators.
This is a clear and meaningful distinction and it doesn't sound supported.
Yes, this is exactly the distinction I was struggling to articulate.
“Online” has collapsed into a single bucket that includes friends-only play, strangers, stores, chat, downloads, etc. What I want (and what you’re describing with running servers) is a way to scope online access: friends-only communication, no discovery, no stores, no strangers.
The frustrating part is that many platforms either (a) force these things to come as a bundle, so saying “yes” to playing with friends implicitly says “yes” to a much larger surface area; or (b) make the unbundling process so complex that well-meaning parents fail and exhausted parents give up.
> The issue is that the kid wants to play a game with his friends [...] This is a clear and meaningful distinction and it doesn't sound supported.
Clear how it could restrict to friends-only when connecting directly to another Nintendo Switch user, but a bit murky how it'd make that determination in cases like Minecraft where the client is connecting to a cross-platform user-hosted game server that is not associated with any Nintendo/Microsoft account.
Could work if you have the parents manually whitelist specific server IPs, as they could with router/firewall, though not sure if "could you whitelist 209.216.230.207 please?" would present a meaningful choice in most cases.
So that is "online" in the sense that it uses the internet.. but it isn't the same as a web browser, or an open store of every online app.
I run game servers for my nephew. I know he only adds his friends and I can keep a loose eye on them. I don't care if his friends talk about boobs or make penis jokes (they're 14), I only care that there aren't any predators.
This is a clear and meaningful distinction and it doesn't sound supported.