UPDATE: A Roku representative has now stated that the company is rolling out a fix for the issue today (November 18, 2019). Original story follows.
One of the weirdest Pokemon Sword & Shield compatibility issues is one that causes some versions of Roku devices to crash unless the user's Nintendo Switch is put into airplane mode. Pokemon Sword & Shield was at the center of a lot of controversy leading up to its worldwide launch, but few of the issues fans seemingly had with the game stemmed from its technical specs or the way the software functioned.
Instead, most of what fans were upset about stemmed from one controversial decision on behalf of developer Game Freak - the removal of the National Dex, which took away a huge selection of Pokemon from fans who had carried them with them across generations of games. Game Freak implied that the decision to remove the National Dex was done to prevent having to spend so much time on just designing, porting, and balancing Pokemon across generations whenever a new game came out, freeing up the developers to add new features and make improvements. While there are still a lot of disgruntled fans now that the game has launched, Pokemon Sword & Shield reviews have indicated that the game is of the same quality fans have come to expect from the series, although that may be a little disappointing for those who expected the leap to a console for the first time in a mainline game might bring with it some dramatic changes.
A Reddit user named MazInger-Z posted to the Pokemon subreddit with a problem they had been experiencing with Pokemon Sword & Shield, which has a bizarre crash and compatibility issue that its developers could never have seen coming. According to the user, Pokemon Sword & Shield running in the same household as a Roku device can cause the latter to stop working, crashing the device altogether. That same user also indicated that they had discovered a temporary fix - players navigating Pokemon Sword & Shield while using Roku devices in their household can simply turn their Nintendo Switch to airplane mode in order to subvert the issue until its fixed.
In a different Reddit thread exploring the same issue, a Roku representative stated that the company was aware of the issue and would be working "diligently to resolve the issue." It's one of the most bizarre compatibility issues in recent memory for gaming, as it's not strictly the Nintendo Switch, but rather the software in Pokemon Sword & Shield that is causing issues. It's also one of those problems that neither company could have adequately prepared for or tested - especially Roku, whose representatives were completely blindsided by the issue - but at least the companies are aware and working on a fix.
Despite all of the technological breakthroughs video games have had in recent years, there's still no way for developers to prepare for everything. The Pokemon Sword & Shield Roku crash issue is an amusing callback to the way games could sometimes feel years ago, when random software issues could prevent otherwise fully-functioning titles to malfunction in strange ways. While we're glad that's not a common problem anymore, at least these days there are online patches to shore up those problems, and the Pokemon Sword & Shield Roku crash issue will likely be sorted out quickly as a result.
Pokemon Sword & Shield is available now for Nintendo Switch.