Nintendo quietly shipped a stack of updates on Monday night — new firmware for both the Switch 2 and the original Switch, plus a meaty patch for Super Mario Party Jamboree. None of it is flashy on its own, but together it sketches where the platform is heading: more sharing, more gifting, more reasons to be inside Nintendo's ecosystem with your friends and family.

The firmware: version 23.5.0

The headline feature in system update 23.5.0 is groundwork for eShop gifting. Per the patch notes published by Nintendo's support page and reported by Nintendo Life and Gematsu, both consoles now support an upcoming feature that lets you gift Nintendo eShop products to a member of your Nintendo Account family group. The catch: it doesn't switch on until an eShop update scheduled for November 17, 2026.

The Switch 2 gets a few extras of its own:

  • Accessibility at setup: you can now configure accessibility settings during the console's first-time setup, rather than digging them out of System Settings afterwards.
  • Portuguese (Portugal) has been added to the Text to Speech languages and to GameChat's "Convert Text to Speech" languages.
  • The usual "general adjustments and fixes to improve the user experience."

The original Switch's 23.5.0 update is slimmer: gifting support plus general fixes, per Nintendo Life.

Mario Party joins the share economy

The same night, Nintendo pushed version 2.4.0 of Super Mario Party Jamboree. The big addition, reported by Gematsu: GameShare using GameChat is now live for the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition. Select "GameShare" on the title screen and you'll find a new "Friends via GameChat" option — meaning friends can join your Mario Party session online even if they don't own the game.

The update also adds maps and rules as configurable options for GameShare sessions on the Switch 2 Edition, and rolls in gameplay fixes for both console versions.

Super Mario Party Jamboree update artwork
Jamboree 2.4.0 adds GameShare via GameChat on Switch 2 — friends can join without owning the game. Gematsu

Why this matters

Individually these are housekeeping patches. Collectively, they're Nintendo building out the social plumbing of the Switch 2 era. GameShare-over-GameChat turns a party game into a genuinely shareable one — the person who bought Jamboree becomes the host for a whole friend group. And eShop gifting, once it activates on November 17, finally gives family groups a native way to buy games for each other without passing around codes.

For a company that spent years treating online features as an afterthought, a week that delivers remote play-together and digital gifting infrastructure is a real shift in posture. The gifting feature's full shape — pricing, eligible products, regional limits — lands with the eShop update next week.