The preloads for Animal Crossing: New Horizons have launched worldwide, and confirmed the handling of saves for the game.

New Horizons save data will not be transferable to other Switch consoles, according to the North American and European eShop listings. Similar restrictions have been used in third party games, such as Yu-Gi-Oh: Legacy of the Duelist and Trials Rising, but this is the first first-party title to be so restricted. The save also cannot be uploaded to the Nintendo Switch Online save data cloud, but post launch subscribers are planned to be able to restore data from the server in the event of a lost or damaged Switch.

These save restrictions are in addition to previously announced restrictions on the number of islands per system.