Want YouTube on Switch 2? You Need a Battle Royale

360p. That's the maximum resolution you'll get if you want to watch YouTube on your Switch 2 right now, and you'll need to download a free-to-play battle royale game to get there.

As discovered by Reddit user JampyL on the r/NintendoSwitch2 forum, the free-to-play game Super Animal Royale has a news feed on its main menu that includes embedded video links. Clicking one of those videos and selecting "watch on YouTube" opens an external browser, and from there you can search for and watch whatever you want. It's a hack, not a feature, and it shows.

The experience is rough. Videos are locked to 360p with no option to increase quality. You can't sign in to your Google account. The YouTube site itself barely loads; thumbnails go missing, channel banners break, and you'll likely need to reload the page multiple times just to get past cookie prompts. Full-screen playback is the only option, so forget reading comments while you watch. In handheld mode, the low resolution is tolerable. Docked on a TV, it looks like you're streaming through a toaster.

A Missing App That Should Exist

The original Switch had a native YouTube app. The Switch 2 has been on sale for close enough to a year now and still doesn't. The TeamYouTube account on X reportedly said the app was "scheduled to become available soon" a few months ago, but that post was deleted shortly after. Whether that was a premature reveal or a mistake, nobody outside Google and Nintendo seems to know.

I find this baffling. The Switch 2 runs Pokémon Pokopia, Mario Kart World, and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. Nintendo just put out a new UK ad showcasing the console's first-party lineup. But a basic streaming app that exists on virtually every screen in your house, including the previous Switch, is still absent. The fact that players have to boot a 2D cartoon battle royale and exploit a news ticker to access a web browser in 2026 is absurd, and it makes the platform feel incomplete in a way that no game library can compensate for.

Super Animal Royale itself is actually a decent time if you're into top-down shooters; it supports up to 64 players and carries a "very positive" rating on Steam. But nobody should need to install it as a YouTube delivery mechanism. Google and Nintendo need to sort this out, because the workaround existing at all is an indictment of how slowly basic app support has moved on Switch 2.