The Nintendo Switch is finally out and everyone who’s gotten one has gone crazy. Buying up all the accessories and games they can find, it’s a merry day for everyone. Well, not so fast, as we’re bringing you a public service announcement, thanks to dBrand. Oddly enough, dBrand loves nothing more than to sell all sorts of electronics.
However, they’re warning that putting any sort of skin or sticker on your Switch can damage it. Sadly, they’ll damage the protective coating that’s covering the Switch and ruin the surface.
Hey Reddit,
dbrand here. Exciting day, right? You’re probably running low on battery after a third charge cycle, working on collecting the fourth spirit orb. What a time to be alive! Enough with the small talk though, let’s jump into this.
We’re here to make a public service announcement that under no circumstances should you be buying a vinyl skin / wrap for your Nintendo Switch. Seems like a counter-intuitive narrative from the world’s leading skin manufacturer, right? Allow us to explain.
Simply put, the coating which exists on the JoyCons (and the console – more on that later) is either cured or designed in a way which doesn’t play well with adhesive.
We received the Switch about 96 hours ago and immediately began prototyping. After a couple of prototypes, we saw minor indications of the outer coating beginning to peel off. Nintendo advised that the device we had in-hand was not the final build, although we assumed that pertained more to the software than the hardware.
We continued prototyping and after about 24 hours of applying and removing prototypes, the JoyCons looked like this – image link. At this point, we hit pause on the JoyCons and continued onto the console.
We decided to reserve judgement on whether the JoyCons could be skinned until we purchased a normal unit, like humans do, on release day from a physical retail location. If we found that a retail unit had similar peeling issues, a fact we can now confirm to be true, we would not release skins for the JoyCons.
Unfortunately, our prototyping phase with the pre-release console had another (albeit different) issue with vinyl skin incompatibility. If you look at the back of the Switch, you’ll see that the Nintendo Switch logo and regulatory markings are all screen-printed in a light gray. This screen-printing (or pad-printing) process is also cured in a way which peels off with the adhesive on vinyl wraps. To get a clear understanding of what we mean, take a look at this photo – image link of the back of the console.
Again, we decided to reserve judgement on whether the Console would be skin-able until we purchased a retail unit to compare against the potentially non-final early unit which we were prototyping with.
As you can guess, we purchased a retail unit (ten, in fact… just to make sure it wasn’t an isolated issue) and both the JoyCons and the Console are not compatible with vinyl wraps or any adhesive-backed skin of any kind.
This is really quite unfortunate, not just because we were going to make a ton of money from this console, but more-so because it genuinely did look dope with a skin (check it out in Matte White here – image link).
As for anyone who pre-ordered a Switch skin, we’ll be refunding your order in full over the next 72 hours. Upon execution, you can expect an email from our customer service robots confirming that the refund has been processed. If you pre-ordered a Switch skin alongside other item(s), you’ll receive a refund for only the Switch portion and the remaining pieces will ship normally.
If you have any further questions, feel free to post up. If it’s a specific question regarding your order, the absolute most efficient way to receive a reply is by emailing robots@dbrand.com. Public replies require identity verification that is better served in a private setting, and PMs will end up getting manually transferred over to an email ticket regardless. We’re not bullshitting when we say that our customer service desk is the very best way to get any issues resolved efficiently.
Thanks in advance for your support and enjoy your Switch …as much as you can without a dbrand skin.
So in other words, don’t put any kind of skin on your switch or it could look like these images. Doesn’t look pretty now, does it? So please think twice about applying sort of sticker or skins to your Switch. Perhaps someone will give us some sort of case to let us decorate our systems.
