Op-ed: Game-Key cards have problems, but I’ll take them over download-only.
A Nintendo Switch Game-Key card. Credit: Nintendo
Nintendo’s barrage of Switch announcements over the last two weeks have also come with changes to the way Nintendo treats physical and digital copies of games.
Digital games can now become “virtual game cards,” facilitating slightly more flexible sharing of digitally purchased games between multiple Switch systems owned by the same person or family of people. And physical copies of games can now be either traditional game cards—little bits of plastic with the game stored on a flash memory chip inside—or “Game-Key cards,” which look the same from the outside but don’t actually have any game data stored on them.
A Game-Key card has a “key” stored on it that prompts a download of the game data from Nintendo’s servers the first time you insert it. From then on, the game behaves like a cross between a digital download and a physical game—all of the game’s content has to be on the console’s internal storage or a microSD Express card, but you need to have the Game-Key card inserted before the game will launch.
This is not the same as the download code printed on a digital game card, which can’t be used again once it’s been claimed—as explained on a Nintendo support page, a Game-Key card will work the same way in any other Switch once the game data has been downloaded. It’s not tied to any particular Nintendo Account, as a digital-only game download is.
In that way, a Game-Key card is a bit like playing certain DRM-protected PC games in the days before Steam or installing a disc-based PlayStation or Xbox game to local storage. The game isn’t actively loading any content from the physical media but is instead using the physical media to confirm that you own the game you’re trying to play.
Game-Key cards aren’t ideal
The box format Nintendo is using for Game-Key cards, which are physical releases that don’t actually ship with game data on the card. Credit: Nintendo
People on the Internet have gotten mad about Game-Key cards, just like people on the Internet have gotten mad about many aspects of the Switch 2 launch ($70-to-$80 games, relatively few brand-new first-party launch games, a $449 base price that may end up getting raised again because of Donald Trump’s disruptive and unpredictable tariff program).
And there are real concerns and annoyances that will come with Game-Key cards. Normally, the physical copy of a game is playable right out of the box—or, at most, after downloading patches that are a fraction of the size of the entire game. This saves time, and it saves internal storage space. That’ll be particularly important if you’re trying to stretch the console’s 256GB of internal storage and avoid buying a new microSD Express card.
Now, every time you put the game into a new console, you have to download the whole game again. That’s true if you have multiple Switches in your family, or if you’re passing the card to a friend to play, or if you delete the game to make room for a new one. And you lose the it-just-launches flexibility of downloadable titles since you need to insert a game key card to be allowed to play the game you’ve downloaded.
And then there’s the (very) long-term argument. In 2023, Nintendo shut down the online servers for its Wii U and 3DS consoles. At that point, it had been years since either console had seen a new game, and it’s almost certain that the vast majority of them are spending most of their time gathering dust or tucked into a drawer. But for game preservationists, it meant that a whole lot was breaking: online play for either system, game update distribution for either system, and downloadable games and DLC for either system.
In a hypothetical future where the Switch servers are also shut down, a “real” game card is still a playable game. A Game-Key card becomes a hunk of plastic.
… but I prefer this to the alternative
A game card being inserted into a Nintendo Switch 2. Credit: Nintendo
But let’s be honest with ourselves. Physical game releases have been dying out gradually for years, a product of the natural evolution of technology and the fact that it costs more to manufacture and ship a physical object than it does to provide server bandwidth for a game download.
At this point, game companies probably aren’t choosing between shipping either a regular-old game card or a Game-Key card—they’re likely deciding whether to ship a Game-Key card or nothing. Digital-only has become the default model for most independently developed games and smaller releases from big publishers. When some of those games get physical releases at all, it’s handled through a specialty retailer like Limited Run Games, which will package up a small handful of them to satisfy physical game dead-enders.
I count myself as a member of that group, by the way, partly because I like having Things To Look At On A Shelf. But mostly because a game cartridge is a useful object to me in a way that a downloaded game is not. I can pass a game card to a friend so they can see if their kids like the game without having to spend money on it first. I can go halvsies with a friend on a game we both want to play but don’t want to pay $60 for. I can sell a game card when I’m done with it for some portion of its original value—and occasionally, for particularly rare out-of-print games, for significantly more than I paid for it in the first place.
This is called “sharing things,” and it’s how owning stuff has worked for as long as people have owned stuff. I can lend or borrow a book; I can lend or borrow a tool; I can lend or borrow a phone charger. But it’s something that’s being steadily eroded in the streaming and digital download age, when companies and a certain kind of Internet commenter/social media poster will pedantically explain to you that you are not buying a thing, you are buying a license to view or use a thing.
The main reason I stick with physical games is because that sucks! That’s a bad arrangement!
A Game-Key card, for all its weird faults and inconveniences, still manages to clear that bar for me. It’s not a non-transferable title tied to my Nintendo account for all time, restricted to whatever sharing mechanism Nintendo decides I can use. It is still a thing to be looked at and a transferrable physical object that retains inherent value in a way that a downloadable game does not. I would prefer “real” game cards, and I don’t love the market forces that gave rise to the Game-Key card idea. But I can still work with this.
Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.
