An Introduction to “Game-Key Cards”

Recently, Nintendo has stirred up some controversy amongst their fan base by introducing game-key cards for the Switch 2. What are game-key cards? In short, they are physical game cartridges that can be inserted into the Nintendo Switch 2 which don’t contain any game data. Rather, they simply contain a license key for the game, which is then downloaded from Nintendo’s eShop servers. Even after being downloaded, the cartridge with the license key must remain inserted in the console for the game to remain playable, just like with a regular game cartridge which contains the game data. Also like a regular physical game, the game-key card can be traded, sold, or lent out without being restricted to a single Nintendo account.

The fan reaction to these has been mostly negative. Players don’t like buying a physical copy of the game that, well, doesn’t actually contain a physical copy of the game. It doesn’t help that Nintendo is pushing Switch 2 developers toward using game-key cards to sell their games physically by only offering two options of the proprietary Switch 2 game cartridges to developers. They can either opt for the game-key cards or pay for a (relatively pricey) cartridge with 64 GB of memory on it; no other memory sizes are available. The latter option makes little financial sense for developers of smaller and/or cheaper games, which basically means they have a choice between a selling their physically game via a game-key card or not selling their game physically at all.

All this begs the question: what exactly is the point of buying physical games over digital to begin with? And do game-key cards actually provide any of the benefits of physical games or are they essentially equivalent to purchasing a digital copy? I’ll go through every benefit of physical games that I can think of and explore whether game-key cards provide that benefit or not.

Ownership

The most common argument made in favor of physical games over digital ones is that buying a physical game is the only way that you can truly “own” the game, since when you buy a digital copy, you aren’t really purchasing it. Read the fine print and you’ll see that you’re merely purchasing a license to play the game, which can be revoked by the seller at any time. This is certainly true, but buying a physical copy doesn’t provide all the benefits of ownership that you might assume. It is true that if you buy a physical copy of the video game, you own that game cartridge or disk. Nintendo can’t send goons to your house to take the game cartridge away from you if you violate their terms of service. However, when you buy a physical game you are in fact buying two things: (1) the physical object and (2) the license to use the game data stored in it, just as when you buy the game digitally. The game content on the cartridge is copyrighted and just because you purchased it, that doesn’t mean you have the right to do whatever you want with it. Similarly, if you buy a book, you own the physical book, but have no right to photocopy the contents.

Just like with a digital copy of the game, Nintendo reserves the right to revoke the license of the physical game at any time. With a physical book, there would be basically no way to enforce such a license revocation, but with modern, always-online consoles, it is relatively easy. Nintendo generally settles for simply disabling the accounts of players who they believe have violated their terms of service, but if they wanted to, they could quite easily send a signal to the console that prevents you from playing any games at all. Heck, they could even blacklist the unique ID of the game cartridge to make sure it can’t be played by anyone on any console. If they did that, you could sell the cartridge sure, but it will have basically lost all of its value. Microsoft got themselves in a lot of hot water years back when they announced that they would use this sort of technology to “lock” XBox One game discs to the accounts of the players who first played them. That would mean that while you could technically sell your used XBox One discs, they would be useless to anyone but you. Microsoft eventually backed down from this decision, but it was due to customer backlash, not because of any legal or technical limitations. I should note that modern copyright law is all kinds of messed up, and things probably shouldn’t work this way, but the fact is that they do.

So it is true that you own physical games to a greater extent than digital ones. However, this ownership is hardly “complete”, and you’ll find that many of the same limitations cited as why you don’t truly “own” digital games can be applied equally or nearly equally to physical ones. So what about game key-cards? Well, you still own the physical cartridge, and Nintendo can never take that physical cartridge away from you, just like with regular physical games. So I suppose that is a slight advantage over purely digital games. However, unlike regular physical games, buying a game-key card means that you just own a nearly empty cartridge with nothing but a license key on it. When you buy a regular physical game, you own a cartridge with actual game data on it. Of course, as I just explained, owning a cartridge with the game data isn’t necessarily as advantageous as it may seem, since the only legal way to access the data on the proprietary cartridge is to use Nintendo’s proprietary hardware, which they can lock you out of at any time.

Offline

Another cited benefit of buying physical games is that it allows you to install and play the games while your console is offline. There are some other related benefits as well. If you have a slow internet connection, if the game you’re buying is very large, or if the game download servers are down, buying a physical copy of the game may even allow you to install and play the game faster than if you were to download it.

This is a very real benefit, but it is worth remembering that we no longer live in the NES or PS1 eras. Back then, you could just pop a game disc or cartridge into your console and have complete access to all of its features. Nowadays, even if the game you’re playing doesn’t require a constant internet connection just to play, you’ll probably want to connect at some point to use the game’s online features and get the most out of the game. Even if you have no interest in playing online, the game data on the cartridges of most modern games is usually not the full, polished game it once was. In older console generations, publishers knew that once they manufactured the games, there would be no opportunity to update them. Maybe a severe bug would warrant an update before the next manufacturing run, but generally speaking the state of the game as it was initially published was the state of the game forever. Modern publishers can afford to rush out their games a bit more, knowing that any bugs or missing features can just be patched with a free online update. It is not uncommon for such patches to be available on day 1 of the game’s launch, including updates made to the game between when the physical version was finalized and the actual launch day. There are even game cartridges that only contain some of the game’s data to begin with, expecting you to download the rest if you want to have access to the game in its entirety.

Even considering this, if you care about being able to play offline, physical games are definitely the way to go. It is just worth keeping in mind that modern physical games can have a variety of limitations in this regard that they didn’t used to. From the offline perspective, game-key cards are essentially equivalent to digital games since you still need to download the entire game from online in order to play.

Physical Representation of the Game

Another benefit of physical games is having the game be tangible object. It is nice to be able to line up your games on the shelf, and physically being handed a game as a gift is a whole different experience from getting a download code sent to you via email. This is similar to the “ownership” benefit, though not exactly the same in my mind, and game-key cards actually provide a great example of how it differs. Game-key cards are, just like regular physical games, a physical representation of your purchase. They can be gift-wrapped and the cartridge in the game case can be lined up on your shelf with your other games. I do understand not having the same attachment to a game-key card as a regular cartridge since you know the actual game data is nowhere to be found on it, and I think this feeling is legitimate. That said, its hard to identify any objective differences between the two, as least from the perspective of it being a physical representation of the game. While it could be argued that “code-in-a-box” games also provide this benefit, assuming they come in a regular game case, I would argue that it is significantly inferior to a game-key card, since the codes have no value after you use them to download the game, while the game-key cards still have a practical purpose and there’s actually a reason to keep them.

Saving Hard Drive Space

Another benefit to physical games is that they save hard drive space on your console. The original Switch came with 32 GB of internal storage and the Switch 2 comes with 256 GB. That’s a big step up, but you’ll still run out of space quickly if you plan on downloading 3-4 large games. While the Switch 2 storage is expandable via SD cards, that’s an extra purchase that you may not be interested in making.

Interestingly, Nintendo is actually the final console holdout on which this benefit of physical games is even offered. On the Playstation 5 and XBox Series consoles, games cannot be played directly from the physical discs. Rather, inserting the disc will first install the game to the console’s internal hard drive and the game will be played from there. The only reason you need to keep the disc in the console while playing after this is so that the license key can be verified (sound familiar?).

So on other consoles a game-key card equivalent wouldn’t make a difference in terms of hard drive space, but on the Switch 2 it definitely does. If you buy a game-key card, you will still need to use up storage space on the console itself, the very same as if you had purchased the game digitally. From this perspective, it does make some sense why Nintendo is only offering 64 GB game cartridges. They likely figure that smaller games don’t justify the cost since they won’t save as much hard drive space. And while that may be true, even “small” games can add up. A 256 GB hard drive would only have space for eight 32 GB games, but Nintendo doesn’t offer a 32 GB cartridge. Developers can still opt for the 64 GB one, sure, but that extra expense that Nintendo is imposing just gets passed along to the consumer.

Ability to Sell/Lend

Classically, physical games could be lent and sold and digital games could not. As noted in the “ownership” section, this is not an inherent property of physical and digital games, but how game publishers chose to enforce their copyrights, upheld by a customer base and secondary businesses which expect physical games can be bought, sold, and given away just like in basically any other medium.

On the Switch 2, this distinction between physical and digital games is blurred even more since Nintendo introduced the ability to “share” digitally purchased games with others (with this feature being added to the original Switch as well). Still, this feature is limited to consoles with the same Nintendo account or in the same “Nintendo Account Family Group”, so game-key cards actually give much more flexibility in terms of being able to sell and lend out your games. Nintendo has indicated that they will continue to be equivalent to regular physical games in this regard.

Game Archiving

Another benefit of physical games is that they have the potential to outlast digitally purchased versions of the game. While some physical storage media have longer lifespans than others, video game console digital storefronts tend to last only a few years after the console itself is no longer being sold, though this can vary quite a bit. If you want to pick up and play the game after said console’s eShop has gone down, you may be out of luck, but a physical game will likely still be available to you.

Of course, as I noted in the “offline” section, the game’s online features and any patches added after the physical game’s release, as well as any DLC, still won’t be available, so to get the “best” game experience, you would need some way to access downloaded content regardless. Generally, the options for doing this expand after the console’s lifespan has ended. As hackers’ tools improve and they have more time to investigate the console and as the console manufacturer devotes fewer resources to patching vulnerabilities, options for exporting and sharing digitally downloaded content expand. Of course, there’s no guarantee that this will ever happen for any given console and it may be that it is much easier to dump the content from the game discs or cartridges, meaning that the physical game copies are the only viable methods of archiving these games.

For most players, this doesn’t matter much, though for the game archiving and retro gaming communities, this can make a big difference. In any event, since game-key cards just download the game data from the servers, they are equivalent to digitally-purchased games in this regard.

Closing Thoughts

I think it is clear that while game-key cards do not offer all the advantages of regular physical games, they do share at least some advantages of physical games over digital ones. Many of the claimed benefits of ownership of physical games are not as clear-cut to begin with as they seem though. In a world where console and game manufacturers exert so much control over how you can use your console and how you can play your games, it is understandable that there is pushback against any move that will remove any aspect of game ownership, no matter how slight, from the hands of players.

That said, the video game ownership landscape on consoles is pretty bleak. While many of the legal limitations of what you can do with your games exist on PC as well, since the hardware and operating systems of PCs are generally much more open than dedicated video game consoles, these restrictions are far more easily bypassed. There’s even been a movement in recent years to release more games without any DRM restrictions, though this is still a major uphill battle. It is interesting that, unlike for consoles, the market for physical PC games is virtually nonexistent. While there are a ton of reasons for this, at least one is that many PC gamers likely feel no need to own a physical copy of the game in order to properly own it. Even if the game has DRM, if you bought a game for PC, even digitally, you can always copy those game files, back them up, and generally mess around with them, something that is either impossible or very difficult to do on most consoles. This is also why game modding flourishes so much more on PC than on consoles.

I still love playing video games on console and I still love buying physical console games, but my reactions to the Switch 2’s game-key cards are somewhat mixed. I’m glad that there’s an option that provides at least some of the benefits of physical games rather than just having all these games be digital-only. That said, it’s a shame that Nintendo is pushing publishers so hard toward this option, and not allowing them to sell game cartridges more cost-effectively with smaller storage sizes. I find myself simultaneously hoping that Nintendo corrects course and offers proper physical releases for more games, but also hoping that they don’t veer in the other direction and stop physical releases entirely.