The key card thing is seriously infuriating, both from a consumer standpoint and from a media conservation standpoint.
Basically you own a game cartridge, but as soon as Nintendo shuts down their servers for whatever reason it becomes a useless piece of plastic. They really don’t want us to own anything anymore.
I’m not sure that’s how that works. The Switch already had both physical boxes with digital codes in them and cartridges that required mandatory downloads to run. This seems like a physical unlock key for a digital download, which depending on how it’s implemented is actually easier to both resell and use offline than the Switch 1 solution to the same problem.
I don’t recommend purchasing either, and I avoided both of those options on Switch 1, but I’m pretty sure this at least does not make things any worse.
I have major gripes with a number of pricing choices in this thing, but to the best of my current understanding this one is based on a misunderstanding.
It’s also true of the partial download carts for Switch 1 that don’t include a full playable version of the game in the cart.
Presumably the digital back-compat on the Switch 2 means the Switch will live a lot longer usual for Nintendo platforms, and we don’t know if there will be a backwards compatible Switch 3.
But in practice, this is just an iteration of the Switch 1 version of the same thing. It’s not great. I avoided both the mandatory download carts and will likely avoid these ones, but it’s not a bigger deal than it has been for the past five years or so.
The key card thing is seriously infuriating, both from a consumer standpoint and from a media conservation standpoint.
Basically you own a game cartridge, but as soon as Nintendo shuts down their servers for whatever reason it becomes a useless piece of plastic. They really don’t want us to own anything anymore.
I’m not sure that’s how that works. The Switch already had both physical boxes with digital codes in them and cartridges that required mandatory downloads to run. This seems like a physical unlock key for a digital download, which depending on how it’s implemented is actually easier to both resell and use offline than the Switch 1 solution to the same problem.
I don’t recommend purchasing either, and I avoided both of those options on Switch 1, but I’m pretty sure this at least does not make things any worse.
I have major gripes with a number of pricing choices in this thing, but to the best of my current understanding this one is based on a misunderstanding.
You cannot use the unlock key, or even redownload the game, when, not if, the Switch store goes offline.
This is true.
It’s also true of the partial download carts for Switch 1 that don’t include a full playable version of the game in the cart.
Presumably the digital back-compat on the Switch 2 means the Switch will live a lot longer usual for Nintendo platforms, and we don’t know if there will be a backwards compatible Switch 3.
But in practice, this is just an iteration of the Switch 1 version of the same thing. It’s not great. I avoided both the mandatory download carts and will likely avoid these ones, but it’s not a bigger deal than it has been for the past five years or so.