It is a good thing that the Nintendo Switch 2 is equipped with a base of 256 GB of internal memory – eight times more than the original Switch 32 GB – since some Nintendo Switch do not come to the cartridge at all. Instead, so-called “game key cards” simply contain a “key” with which you will download the game on the Internet, so A support page on the Nintendo website.
“After it has been downloaded, you can play the game by inserting the playing card into your system and starting like a standard physical playing card,” says the page. This is what it looks like in the retail package:
In a way, this is a new shoot in an old trick. Some Nintendo Switch games were sold in retail, but the packaging simply contained a code with which the game was downloaded to their account. To be fair, Switch was not as common as with competitive consoles, but still for the people who committed themselves to buying physical games. In fact, this is the same tactics that Microsoft has (in) famous next to the Xbox One; Of course, that was more than a decade ago and consumer mood changed. We are all games and PS Plus in our games and may feel some “owners” about the digital goods that we buy on Steam. Perhaps.
But I am one of these physical media! First, I am scientifically “old”. I was born in the 1970s, my first job was in a video business (ask your parents) and I still have a large collection of video games (and video game consoles?). I understand that I am not the target group in many ways. But until the change, the view of the purchase of digital Nintendo games was stupid! If you have lost your DS or 3DS on a bus-a not clear scenario for portable game console goods have disappeared your digital purchases. Here I scream in 2012 shortly before the start of the Wii U and in 2017 shortly before the Switch started via Nintendos bad online services.
The good news: I don't have to write the same piece again! Nintendo somehow found that out. I still buy my Switch games in cartridge format, not because I'm afraid to lose the switch, and with it my entire library, but because it is easier to share games with friends and family, including people in my own household. But I am really worried about what happens when companies – and maybe here, nintendo – make their own game servers offline. Can I download what I bought? How do I play older games that are important to me? Microsoft has worked to remedy the unsatisfactory vibrations of digital property, and I often point out that my Steam library (i.e.), like many of the developers and publishers behind the games in my Steam library, can no longer do.
So let's call this a sign of time. We do not know how often Nintendo and its publishing partners will use these “game key cards” solution. In some cases it may be the right answer-safe some games are simply too big to fit on this storage device. Switch game carts with 32 GB, while the coming-to-switch 2 Cyberpunk 2077 Install clips over 50 GB … without the expansion package. Even if it may make sense, I don't have to like it.
