And why I continue to buy games and support sailing the seas.
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.
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.
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)
LOL exactly :D
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.
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.
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’m just going to emulate then. Physical carts was one of the only thing keeping me spending money on Nintendo
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.
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”.
