How To Secure Your Nintendo Account With A Passkey (And Keep Your Games Safe)

Slowly but surely, better digital security practices are being drilled into the heads of the average person. Whether it's using strong, non-duplicative passwords or turning on two-factor authentication, it's become mainstream, as it should be. One additional option that's slowly gaining popularity is the use of passkeys.

As explained by Google, "[t]he difference between passkeys and passwords is that passkeys are cryptographic key pairs." Each pair is specific to a given website, but the site is privy to only half of it, with the other half being private and stored securely on one of your personal devices. Adds Google: "This technology uses a securely generated code to authenticate your access to websites and apps, instead of a password that may be stolen or leaked."

Using a passkey has various benefits, including great security (no password to remember or have stolen, guessed, or recycled), the ability to use your phone's biometric features to log in to passkey-supporting sites, and being relatively fool-proofed in that the site-specific nature means they can't be solicited by phishing attacks. And now? Nintendo offers it on their accounts. So if you want to make sure nobody can steal your Nintendo account, or even if you just want to make it easier to sign in, read on to see how to generate a passkey for it.

Setting a passkey for your Nintendo account is pretty simple and straightforward, though it requires an iPhone running iOS 16 or better, an iPad running iPadOS 16 or better, a Mac running macOS 13 or better, or an Android device running Android OS 9 or better. On the device that you want to have the passkey registered to, go to Accounts.Nintendo.com and sign in. From there, go to Sign in and security settings > Passkeys > Register a new passkey. Enter your password at the prompt, choose "Register" after reading the disclaimer, and then follow the onscreen instructions.

Nintendo allows a maximum of 10 passkeys per account. If you're told that you can't add a new one, it's because you've hit that limit. The "Passkey has already been registered" message, meanwhile, means that you've already registered a passkey on that device.

For additional account security, it's a good idea to turn on two-factor authentication, as well, although that option is not available on what Nintendo deems "child accounts" (for ages 12 and under). To do this, go to Accounts.Nintendo.com, and, once signed in, choose Sign-in and then select security settings > 2-Step Verification > Edit > 2-Step Verification setup. From there, you need to have an authenticator app on your phone to use with Nintendo's two-factor authentication process. (Though Nintendo specifically names Google Authenticator, others, like Microsoft Authenticator and 2FAS are at least as good and realistically, are probably better options with more features.) Scan the QR code with your authenticator app, follow the onscreen instructions, and you're good to go.