Remember when you use to buy a Switch game and the game would atleast partially before updates, be on the cartridge?
Well imagine buying a key cart for your Switch2 and, you have to download the game from their servers from scratch. The game doesn’t download itself to the cartridge, but onto your Switch 2 consoles internal memory.
Now imagine getting a bad update and trying to delete some data including the update, just to play with the original games version.
physical Key cart games are treated just like they are digital which means you can’t revert the update.
Even if the game is saved onto your Switch’s internal you cannot legally play a key cart game, without the key carts inserted in your switch.
The game data is not stored on the key cartridge but on your switch’s internal memory.
$80 $70 Nintendo Switch 2 carts
This was already true of a number of Switch 1 games, where the partial data in the cart did not include access to the full game. Some gave you access to only a demo (in the line of the “play before the download is finished” feature in home consoles), others not even that. And of course it was true of the “code-in-a-box” products they were selling on retail that you couldn’t even resell or return.
The real issue isn’t how the key carts work, which is an improvement on those.
The issue is that the cost of carts with actual storage has gone up. Nintendo’s change of memory spec means they’ve given up on the low-storage carts, which used to come in a bunch of sizes, some of which were relatively cheap. They’ve gone for a single 64GB SKU, which means the type of game that can afford the physical storage will be significantly restricted.
This may well make technical sense (the new storage standard is based on a SD card update that may not even exist at lower sizes by default), but the practical effect may be that the cost of physical carts makes no sense to anybody but the largest games/publishers, which is a travesty. Nintendo should have found a way around this, even if it is to subsidize the cart cost with their cut of the game’s price to some extent. I get why that’s not the case, since it’d effectively mean giving their cut of each game straight to Amazon and other retailers, but man, does it suck as it is.
I think what we’ll end up seeing is a lot more Limited Run-style expensive collector’s editions being the only physical media releases of many games. And even that only if people do get used to paying extra to subsidize the card out of their own pocket. If I was Nintendo I would have considered making it a standard to have every physical game in both formats as a rule and have people pay an extra tenner for the full storage version. Instead, they chose to try to push the top end of the price range anyway with no guarantee that the cost of media is part of the increase. They’ve been indecisive and the outcome is going to suck.
Of course people would be complaining just as hard if they had done that, which is one of the examples where gamers’ default position being antagonism can yield worse results.