•According to a report by Polygon, Nintendo shows no signs of following Sony’s controversial shift toward an all-digital future. In an interview with YouTuber Coelho no Japão, Bill van Zyll, VP and general manager for Nintendo in Latin America, confirmed the company will continue supporting physical media.
“We go off what the consumer prefers, and take that into account very heavily,” van Zyll said. “We also have a platform that was just launched. We’re barely just over a year into NS2. It’s got both digital and physical – that capability. There’s no plans to ditch physical. We know how much the fans like it as well, so our position has been to be agnostic.”
The term “agnostic” refers to the Nintendo Switch 2 supporting both digital purchases via the Nintendo eShop and physical game cartridges.
We go off what the consumer prefers, and take that into account very heavily. We also have a platform that was just launched. We’re barely just over a year into NS2. It’s got both digital and physical – that capability. There’s no plans to ditch physical.
Bill van Zyll, VP and general manager for Nintendo in Latin America
There is, however, a major caveat: most Nintendo Switch 2 game cartridges don’t function like traditional physical games. Instead of storing games on the media itself, most cartridges act as a “key” that authenticates the purchase and allows users to download the game from the Nintendo Switch store.
This game-key card system takes up more internal storage than if games were saved directly on a cartridge, and it appears to run into the same problems associated with digital game ownership. The question remains whether players would still be able to download a game if Nintendo shut down the servers hosting it.
Beyond nostalgia and collector interest, one of the main points of contention around the pivot to digital is that players don’t technically “own” these games; they are simply purchasing a license to play them. While the specifics around game key cards differ slightly, the effect is the same: if a game becomes unavailable for download, players won’t be able to play it as they could with a traditional physical cartridge.
Many developers favor the pivot to key cards, including Final Fantasy Remake director Naoki Hamaguchi, because it means they don’t have to worry about cramming games onto a 64 GB cartridge. Players are understandably upset that their cartridges may become useless “hunks of plastic” once the servers hosting game downloads go down.
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