We Should Reject the Switch 2's Bogus Game-Key Cards or This Will Be the End of Physical Games

Gizmodo

a day ago

On Sunday, Nintendo propped up a survey for players to share a few thoughts about how they prefer to play games on the Switch 2. By Tuesday, Nintendo pulled the survey, but not before the poll went viral and offered gamers a new outlet to let loose about the lack of Switch 2 games you can buy that come entirely on physical game cards. There's a larger issue at play. The Switch 2 is an inflection point showing how the last few strands of actual game ownership are fraying. Nintendo's most-dedicated audience hopes game-key cards—essentially a download link inside a game card—don't become the standard going forward.
Nintendo says game-key cards 'don't contain the full game data.' They instead include a 'key' that lets you immediately download a game to the Switch 2 as soon as you plop it in. The main benefit compared to a full digital download is you can easily sell or give away your game-key card when you want, but it's barely any better than a digital download. Game-key cards take the worst aspects of physical ownership—the possibility somebody could steal or you could lose your game—while missing out on all the benefits a regular game card provides. Downloading a game requires an internet connection, and some gamers will be hampered by slower internet speeds. Collectors want to actually own the game, rather than a key for it. Nintendo's user agreement shares how a digital download is merely a license to use the software on the system. Nintendo can restrict your games or your account, and it may even remotely deactivate your console if the company detects you've tried pirating its games. Game-key cards are just another method of DRM—or digital rights management—that restricts users from using the software they buy however they want to.
Even if you play by the rules, that doesn't mean you'll have access to your digital download indefinitely. Nintendo, like every other game publisher, isn't going to keep its servers for downloading games running forever. The company took its Wii U and 3DS eShop services offline in 2023, and while that sucks, 11 and 12 years of operation, respectively, are longer than the systems' life cycles. To be fair, you can still download the games you own for those platforms, but you can't purchase any new software. At any moment, Nintendo could end the option to download old games as well. Cory Doctorow, a tech blogger, author, and longtime anti-DRM advocate (you can also thank him for coining the word 'enshittification'), told Gizmodo game-key cards represent the worst impulses of Nintendo.
'Nintendo could distribute a game with a physical token and create a situation where players truly own the games they buy,' Doctorow said over email. 'Given the company's legendary hostility to game preservation efforts (e.g., Super Smash Bros.) and that they refuse to make any guarantees or even representations about how long the game servers will be online for users who hold these tokens to retrieve the game from, this amounts to 'a downloadable game you can't play if you lose the little dingus that came with it'—not a game that is yours to play for as long as you want or that you can sell or give away when you get tired of it.'
Compared to other consoles or PCs where games can demand well over 100GB of storage, Nintendo's less-powerful hardware ensured most titles didn't need nearly as much storage. While the Switch 2 has 256GB of built-in storage, the original Switch has only 32GB—almost mandating the use of a microSD card for more storage capacity. This limitation required both first- and third-party developers to format games to make them as small as possible. The original Switch became one of the last few bastions of physical media contained solely on a card you could own.
The Switch 2 promised to be a much more powerful system, allowing devs to port today's modern titles with much less fuss. Having access to that fidelity means games will be larger, but developers still have some amount of control. CD Projekt Red managed to fit Cyberpunk 2077—which normally takes up more than 83GB on PC—on a 64GB Switch 2 game card. That game is an outlier compared to the Switch 2 third-party launch lineup. First-party games like Donkey Kong Bananza are contained on-card, but most third-party games are not. It doesn't matter the size of the game, either. Street Fighter 6 at 50GB is on a game-key card. Octopath Traveler 0, a low-fi old-school JRPG, is also slated to get a game-key card release Dec. 4.
Publishers have to pay more money for larger flash storage inside of a game card. This problem is exacerbated by the reported lack of various game card sizes available to third parties. Early reports suggest Nintendo only offered 64GB game cards to outside publishers and saved smaller game card sizes for itself. That may change in the future. The Nintendo Patent Watch account on Bluesky first spotted that the company that made game cards for the original Switch, Macronix, could be preparing to make more cards with 'varying capacity needs.' That doesn't mean it will make more cards for Switch 2. The report doesn't even mandate that publishers choose actual game cards over cheaper game key cards.
There are other consumer benefits to physical over digital. In a healthy retail ecosystem, brick-and-mortar shops offer discounts to move old product out of stores and make room for new content. Digital-only games cost what they cost. Nintendo said in its latest financial results that it sold 8.67 million software units in the first seven weeks after launch on June 5. Most of those were the digital version of Mario Kart World, which came bundled with the $500 launch version of the Switch 2. The new Mario Kart may be an outlier. Switch gamers have historically hung onto physical games longer than on other consoles. Circana industry analyst Mat Piscatella reported late last year that 53% of Switch game sales in the middle of 2024 were digital. By comparison, the vast majority of game sales on PlayStation 5 are digital downloads. If Nintendo fans fail to hit back against game-key cards, it could be the last domino to fall in the effort to own and preserve the games we buy.