Nintendo Switch 2 Game-Key Card Overview

en-americas-support.nintendo.com

7 points·hnburnsy··3 comments

This is genius of them. To 99% of their customer base, this card will have the same value as a real game card but Nintendo gets all the benefits of cloud distribution. Also the customer can also easily sell the card on the secondary market.

>Game-key cards are different from regular game cards, because they don’t contain the full game data. Instead, the game-key card is your "key" to downloading the full game to your system via the internet

They decided to ramp anti-piracy up a big ol' notch, I see. No benefit at all to this for the user. Defeats much of the point of buying the physical game instead of digital (not quite all if this still lets you "share" [carry around and use on other consoles] the game without being stuck with their very-limited digital game sharing system)

Also, we're currently dealing with a Switch with a broken SD card slot that won't read cards anymore (can they please make these children's toys more durable this time?) so physical game cartridges with actual game data on them are the only thing keeping our console from being literal garbage... another reason to dislike this.

This'll hurt system longevity, too. Fewer physical games that continue to function once they shut down online service for the console.

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