And why I continue to buy games and support sailing the seas.
Hardly inevitable. I’m broke af, the economy is collapsing, so not spending money on Nintendo is the easiest possible choice. Literally not buying something you don’t need is the easiest form of protest.
You unpatriotic cuck /s (hopefully obvious)
Not inevitable if people fought back… but people keep telling companies this shit is ok by paying them to screw everyone over. Companies used to have to replace your bugged cartridge with a patched one or risk backlash and profit losses.
I’m willing to bet that the majority of people don’t really care about this. If they did, you’d see GoG do wildly better than Steam does. People like DRM and the convenience with having your library digitally available with the ease of installation, they just don’t like badly implemented DRM.
Remember when people lost their shit over an Xbox console being all digital distribution and no ability to sell used games like 10 years ago maybe?
https://kotaku.com/that-xbox-one-reveal-sure-was-a-disaster-huh-509192266
Nintendo fans are fucking masochists.
Nintendo sucks and all, but Xbox wanted the One to not work at all unless it was online.
People also lost their shit over the PSP Go being digital distro only in a physical handheld console, and lost their shit so hard that Sony of all people walked it back with the Vita and built cartridges back into the spec. (And it became retroactively excusable once it was discovered how easily the PSP/Go could be hacked, and suddenly the Go was the desirable model for emulation and, er, backups. But that’s neither here nor there. Under its intended use, within its original lifespan, it was a stupid idea.)
If you ask me the entire point of a game console is to be a dedicated platform that you stick games in and it always works. If I wanted to fuck around with downloadable only content, games that are only keycodes, patches, day 1 DLC, always-online DRM, and the inevitable day the servers all go dark I’d just game on PC. Which, come to think of it, in these modern times is exactly what I do anyway. I have game systems dating all the way back to the Atari VCS which I can to this very day if I feel like it slap a cartridge or disk in and they play. To me, there is immense value in that. Without that, there’s really no need for the “real hardware experience” for me. I can just emulate if any title comes out that I truly give enough of a shit about that I must play it. Anything else is just selling you a rental, but at full price. I find that immensely distasteful.
So I have zero interest in the Switch 2, and thus it will be the first Nintendo console in history I don’t own, or aim to own (I do not have a Virtual Boy, much to my shame and embarrassment.) I imagine I’m not the only one. Nintendo’s been trying very hard to lose the plot, which for a company as profitable and famous as they are takes a real concerted effort. Congratulations to them, then, if that’s the goal – What we are witnessing here is very possibly the beginning of the end for big N.
I do not have a Virtual Boy, much to my shame and embarrassment.
Yes, but you do own the best console for playing Virtual Boy games, the 3DS. Red Viper is really good now.
And I also have a VR headset and VirtualBoyGo if I really feel like giving myself an authentic headache.
Not to defend Nintendo much here, but the situation with game-key-cards is at least better than that. You can freely trade, give away, resell them like any physical cart.
It’s a step up from digital in terms of freedom, but a step down in convenience (cart has to be in the system).
Compared to real, physical, data on the cart media though, these are a definite downgrade.
Someday we’ll find out that all the Switch 2s actually peer together and create a blockchain to track ownership
And at least Microsoft was toying With letting you transfer your license which would’ve created a secondary market. We don’t even have that!
I think the Nintendo game key cards are tied to the physical game cards so they can be sold or transferred to new owners.
Couple things there.
There are Virtual Game Cards, purchased and downloaded digitally from the eShop. These can now be traded, sold, gifted, loaned, etc. to other friends, which was not previously possible. (This could possibly require an NSO subscription, but I’m not clear if that’s true at all.)
There are physical game cartridges, which contain the actual game on them, and (from what I’ve heard) most games will be distributed this way.
Then, there are also physical carts that contain only the virtual game license file, thus that you have to possess the physical cart in order to download or play the game. Apparently, there are Switch 1 games like this already, but they are rare.
With the introduction of Virtual Game Cards, it is no longer possible (even on Switch 1) to play more than one copy of a game online at the same time, even with a min NSO Family subscription.
But it does allow you to transfer/sell games purchased from the eShop. That seems good to me, no?
Of course, I’m just talking about how the digital licensing landscape ended up shaking out. Nintendo also sells all their games digital and you can’t transfer those. Hell until the switch 2 you didn’t even have a unified account across devices.
Nintendo also sells all their games digital and you can’t transfer those.
Yet.
They’ve advertised Virtual Game Cards as a value-added feature to let your friends borrow games, but I’d bet good money they built out that infrastructure to comply with the potential for the EU to require used sales on digital.
I’m willing to bet that 95% of their customers do not have an issue with this. Probably the majority don’t even realize that someone could have an issue with this. People are already very used to having to do big downloads with games and a lot of switch 1 games were already requiring half of the game to be downloaded due to large cart costs. Also tbh I don’t think it’s really a preservation issue as long as piracy exists.
Consumers lost that fight decades ago with horse armor.
I’m just going to emulate then. Physical carts was one of the only thing keeping me spending money on Nintendo
People can use Torzu if they want to play Switch games for free.
There will definitely be an emulator for Switch 2 games, as well.
I thought Game Key Cards, while not something I would ever buy, weren’t the end of the world if they were just meant to replace the existing practice of code-in-a-box for games that won’t fit on a cart. It’s actually less bad than that, so I didn’t get out my pitchfork just yet.
But the sheer number of games being released in this format is alarming. Code-in-a-box was rare, this is looking like it’s outnumbering proper physical games. And many of these games don’t even make sense to be key cards, they can fit just fine on a cart. There are ports of Switch 1 games that already fit on Switch 1 carts in here!
What the hell is happening?
Greed
Switch carts are proprietary and expensive. Rumor has it that 64 GB is the smallest cart you can buy for the switch 2. And corporations will do anything to save a buck.
I’m hoping that at least Nintendo will release their full games on the card. The truth is I’m probably not buying many third party games on Switch that aren’t exclusives.
Same. I have no plans to even buy one until I see what their first party offerings end up being
Afaik, they are. It’s just that third party developers would need to optimize their file sizes heavily for the great pay off of reducing their profit margin. They already didn’t want to do that for the Switch and Nintendo now enables them to not do it to incentivize more ports.
At least in Japan, I think, every 1st party game comes on the cartridge, pretty much every third party game except for Cyberpunk comes as a code.
64GB is the maximum cart size, not minimum.
Nintendo is prob charging companies more for storage on game carts than they did for switch 1. That’s my guess at least.
Shareholder value and control.
I won’t purchase these. It’s nonsense.
OP, please do us a favor of titling post with the true thesis of the article, and not their disingenuous headlines. E.g.
Ziff Davis, Inc. $ZD has contracts with $NTDOY & ¥7974.T that it selected three people to blurb out things that aligns with their portfolios:
Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios (which specialises in modern remasters of older, often out-of-print games) said that “seeing Nintendo do this is a little disheartening”, adding: “You would hope that a company that big, that has such a storied history, would take preservation a little more seriously.”
Videogame Heritage Society co-founder Professor James Newman is somewhat less convinced that Game-Key Cards will be a major issue, noting that it’s rare for a game on a cartridge to still be the same game years after release.
“Even when a cartridge does contain data on day one of release, games are so often patched, updated and expanded through downloads that the cart very often loses its connection to the game, and functions more like a physical copy protection dongle for a digital object,” he explained.
Meanwhile, Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at The Strong Museum in New York said the move to a future where all games are digital is “inevitable”, and that Nintendo has in fact been “in some ways, the slowest of the major console producers to be going there”.
Game-Key Cards?
It’s like a virtual license file for a game. It’s basically the same system as before but now you can trade them with people on your friends lists.
People with kids: be sure to set parental controls on this before your kids are bullied into sending away all the games you bought them
WDIT: I see the article is not actually about the virtual key cards but the physical ones. This is a game cert without the game on it, just the license file. You still have to download it.
Honestly I think that fucking sucks because they can just take it away from you.
After researching the question a little more on the Internet, I can confidently say that this is bullshit. Screw Nintendo.
