Remember when a cartridge was the game? You popped it in, heard that satisfying click, and just played. No downloads. No patches. No nonsense. The Switch 2 throws that out. Nintendo’s new game keycards look like regular cartridges, but they’re basically plastic tokens that tell your console to go download the game from the internet. There’s no actual game on the card.
According to Nintendo's own support page, the data isn’t included. You must download it. That’s not physical media. That’s a license with extra steps.
Why are they doing this? Because actual cartridges are expensive. A 64GB Switch cart can cost publishers up to $16 each. Compare that to a few cents for a Blu-ray disc. So instead, they sell us empty cards, save money, and dump the storage costs and download burden on the user.
And this isn’t just a minor change. It’s the end of an era.
Here’s what we’re losing:
- Physical media that actually works offline
- Long-term ownership that doesn’t rely on server uptime
- The ability to trade, lend, and resell your games
- Instant play with no waiting, downloading, or patching
- Any chance of future preservation or archival
Collectors are rightly pissed. Game boxes are starting to become decoration. The cart inside doesn’t contain the game anymore. When the servers go down someday, your "physical copy" is a dead stick.
Practically, this shift sucks. You’ll need to buy more SD cards. You’ll blow through data caps. If your internet goes down or you’re on the road, too bad, your game doesn’t work. And if you want to preserve or mod it in the future, good luck. The key is encrypted. The data is elsewhere.
Nintendo claims they're not going all digital. Doug Bowser said physical games are still a key part of their business. Maybe for their first-party titles. But for third-party developers, this is a cost-cutting free-for-all. One of the only companies still shipping full games on cart is CD Projekt Red, and that’s because they care about long-term ownership. Most others won’t bother.
Even worse, you’re not even saving money. Switch 2 game keycards are still going for $90 in Australia. So what are we actually paying for?
There are things Nintendo could do. Subsidise bigger carts. Make a rule that small games must ship fully on cart. Add compressed assets to carts to cut download size. Clearly label boxes that require downloads instead of hiding it in fine print. But they're not doing that. And the writing’s on the wall.
The Switch 2 game keycard system feels like the slow euthanasia of physical gaming. It’s not progress. It’s just cheaper for everyone except the customer. I’m sticking with the original Switch as long as I can, collecting real cartridges while they still mean something.
It has reached to the point for me when a Switch 2 game is released and it's also on Switch 1 (and is a keycard), I'll opt for the Switch 1 version. But what's gonna happen when the Switch 2 only games are released and on keycards.
Because when the click is gone, a big part of gaming dies with it. It legitimately makes me sad as someone who always buys physical games that I will live to see a day when physical games cease to exist and then what are we left with?
It's why you can go buy a Nintendo 64 or SNES system from decades ago and the games work. Because there's no patches, no downloads, it's all on the cartridge. We don't know what we're losing and we're just letting it happen.