Latest news with #VirtualGame
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Yahoo
Nintendo Virtual Game Card Update Closes Switch Loophole
Once you update your Nintendo Switch to version 20.0.0 (which came out on April 29), you should see icons for two new features that will also be on the upcoming Switch 2: GameShare and Virtual Game Card. Nintendo's new sharing system promises to help people play simultaneously from a single game copy (provided one of the consoles is a Switch 2), but, as Ars Technica points out, this coincides with the end of a similar situation that worked with just Switches. So long as you bought the digital copy of a game, you could have, for example, two players playing together with that same digital copy simultaneously. The key was to have an internet connection (and the purchasing Nintendo account) on the secondary console, instead of the primary. That system didn't work with physical copies. According to Ars Technica, that capability is gone, along with the Nintendo FAQ info on the topic. GameShare and the Virtual Game Cards are now the law of the Switch and Switch 2 land. The GameShare feature is Nintendo's new way of letting you share a single game with other players. The other players don't need to be part of your family account, but you must have a Switch 2 and own the game. You then share the game with the other Switches via local wireless (the other player must be nearby). The potential problem here is that the game must be 'compatible' with GameShare, suggesting that not all games will be. That adds confusion for people when they buy games—they need to check to make sure they'll be able to share them. We'll see how this shakes out when the Switch 2 arrives, but we have a sinking feeling that some expensive, popular games won't support GameShare. We can always hope. As for the Virtual Game Cards, they represent the games you buy digitally. You can load/unload them to move them to another Switch. If you have family members who own Switches (and are part of your Nintendo Account family group), you can also lend your virtual game cards to them for up to 14 days. Once you lend the game, you can't play it until you have it back, so Nintendo included a way for you to retrieve the game from the borrower if you need it before the end of the 14-day lending period. Interestingly, your Switch or Switch 2 should also have an Online License setting now. If you have a second Switch/Switch 2, you can skip the load/unload shenanigans and play a game without its Virtual Game Card present—so long as you have an internet connection.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Nintendo's digital Switch game sharing plan could be so much simpler
In the final days of our pre-Switch 2 world, Nintendo is trying to rethink how sharing games works. The biggest announcement from the company's latest Direct was its upcoming Virtual Game Cards feature, a new approach to sharing digital games that improves on the company's current system, but still carries limitations that keep it from feeling truly modern. Virtual Game Cards attempt to make digital games as easy to share as physical ones. That starts with the company visually representing games as "cards" and using the language of loading and ejecting them, and extends to how simple they are to share. Two Switch consoles logged into your Nintendo Account can share any digital game just by "ejecting" it from one and "loading" it on another. The only catch is that the consoles need to be connected over local wireless (as in, be physically near each other) when the trade happens, and be able to access the internet to download the game and run it for the first time. You can similarly share a Virtual Game Card with anyone in the same Nintendo Account family group for two weeks, after which the game automatically returns. In both cases, saves for each game stay on the console where the game was played, making it simple to share the Virtual Game Card again and keep playing. In comparison to Nintendo's current system, which requires defining a Switch console as "primary" and able to be used offline and other devices as a "secondary" and needing an internet connection to play shared games, Virtual Game Cards are a meaningful improvement. If you're a parent trying to share games with your kids or a super-fan with multiple Switches (something Nintendo no doubt wants to encourage), Virtual Game Cards have basically solved the problem — or at least made it much easier to manage and understand. The company isn't exactly leading the pack here, though. If I own a game on PlayStation, I can download it on my Playstation 4 and PlayStation 5, and play on either console, without needing to go through the rigamarole of ejecting virtual cards. The same goes for Steam games. Valve even goes further and lets the vast majority of games be shared and played on accounts connected to the same Steam Family, without your computers needing to be near each other when you "hand-off" games. People are highly sensitive to any kind of DRM. Just ask Xbox, which had big plans to change how loaning games work when the Xbox One was announced, but had to dramatically backtrack after basically everyone complained. Nintendo isn't pulling an Xbox, per se, but it is pitching something adjacent. Virtual Game Cards are inarguably better than how things work now, but they require an internet connection and they still limit how many people can play a game at once. Nintendo came up with a better mental model for sharing games, but not necessarily a better way to do it.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
With the Switch 2 coming, Nintendo is working on Virtual Game Cards for cross-device portability
Nintendo announced on Thursday that it is working on Virtual Game Cards, a feature that makes digitally downloaded games more portable across different devices. With the highly awaited Nintendo Switch 2 on the horizon, these Virtual Game Cards will make it easier for users to port over their existing Switch games to their new devices. As it stands, Switch games can be purchased either as a physical game card -- like a traditional video game cartridge -- or as a digital download. While physical game cards can easily be ejected and reinserted into another Switch for easy play, digital downloads have been a bit harder to port from device to device. Available in late April, Virtual Game Cards are intended to make digital games operate more like physical ones. Players can easily migrate games between two devices, so long as they connect locally the first time a game is transferred. The Virtual Game Cards also come with the functionality to lend games to anyone in your Nintendo Family Group, which includes up to eight people, via local Wi-Fi. Users can only lend one game at a time to a particular person, and at the end of a 14-day borrowing period, the games return automatically to the lender. While there's no official word yet on when the Switch 2 will come out, fans are looking forward to more information about the console on a Nintendo Direct livestream scheduled for April 2. Sign in to access your portfolio
