this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Seems so. Notably, Switch 1 already has games with a similar warning on the box.
They're just giving a name to it.
On one hand, I'm glad they're up front about it (and I'd rather see an even uglier, larger warning on the cover for game key cards). On the other, I hope this isn't a sign that they're legitimizing it or that it'll be more common.
Yep. The slight difference is that those Switch games typically included a chunk of the game in the cart and sometimes were partially playable. Short of requiring a smaller download, though, it was the same practical function.
I still don't like it, but those carts get prohibitively expensive at high sizes.
As someone with two kids who play games on the switch, physical carts keep me from having to buy every game two or three times.
So losing the ability to buy a game and share it between three switches will severely increase the costs of games for me.
Yeah, it definitely puts their overhaul of digital game sharing in perspective. They are ABSOLUTELY shifting to digital. I wouldn't be surprised if the Switch 2 Lite had no cartridge slot at all.
That said, their idea here seems to be that you have a physical cart with a game license in it so you can download the game on multiple consoles and then just swap the key around. That is not a new idea, but it goes to show how frustrated by the limitations of having to ship flash memory with every game they are.
More like, they’ve never been known to pass the savings to the consumer on the digital front. Some games were more expensive on the e shop than physical copies from time to time iirc.
That was less a Nintendo thing than a retailer thing. Retailers didn't take kindly to being undercut, first parties got to keep more of the revenue, so there was literally no incentive anywhere to make digital cheaper.
But let's be clear, everybody involved except for the retailer made a lot less for a physical copy in that scenario. The real thing that changed here is Nintendo isn't afraid of not having shelf space anymore.
And while key-in-cart means retailers still keep a cut, storage costs on Switch cartridges are HUGE, so there's still an incentive to get users to subsidize storage.
Physical games weren't cheaper at MSRP, but retailers were known to put them on sale or lower their price permanently more frequently than Nintendo's eShop.