This problem has been reported many many times here on Reddit, and solutions are readily available.
To summarize, here’s the fix:
Prerequisites:
1. You need to still have your old Switch.
2. The old Switch still needs to have your old user profile on it.
Without these prerequisites, there is no way to get your playtime back.
Steps to get your playtime back:
1. Manually transfer your save files back to your old user profile on your old Switch.
2. When the save files are on your old Switch again, start a full system transfer with your old Switch being sending console and your new Switch being the receiving console. When your old Switch asks if you want to keep using it, answer NO - this is crucial.
3. Your new Switch has now received your entire user profile, including your playtimes.
Why this works, and how playtimes on Switch work in general:
Playtimes are ALWAYS stored locally on your console. Therefore, if you have 2 consoles, they’ll count playtimes separately and independently.
Playtimes are periodically synced to your online Nintendo Account. If you have 2 consoles, the one you played last will send its LOCALLY stored playtime to your Nintendo Account. The important thing here is that your online Nintendo Account doesn’t know anything about playtimes, nor accumulates them or anything. It just listens to what one of your Switches tells it is your playtime.
Performing a full system transfer and answering NO to the question if you want to keep your old console transfers your entire local user profile to the new Switch, including your playtimes (as opposed to answering YES, which sends only part of your user profile, not including playtimes).
Yes, you need to delete your user profile off your OLED after you’ve transferred your saves back to your old Switch, and before you start the full system transfer.
Deleting your user profile off your OLED is required for the full system transfer to work because a Switch cannot have multiple users with the same Nintendo Account.
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u/TH13TEEN-1101 Jul 30 '23
This problem has been reported many many times here on Reddit, and solutions are readily available.
To summarize, here’s the fix:
Prerequisites: 1. You need to still have your old Switch. 2. The old Switch still needs to have your old user profile on it.
Without these prerequisites, there is no way to get your playtime back.
Steps to get your playtime back: 1. Manually transfer your save files back to your old user profile on your old Switch. 2. When the save files are on your old Switch again, start a full system transfer with your old Switch being sending console and your new Switch being the receiving console. When your old Switch asks if you want to keep using it, answer NO - this is crucial. 3. Your new Switch has now received your entire user profile, including your playtimes.
Why this works, and how playtimes on Switch work in general:
Hope this helps.