I think it's silly that the conversation on preserving games revolves around hardware. The hardware is irrelevant. It's about the right to create digital backup for personal use. Whether the game is downloaded or burned on a disc, it's just software.
The main problem used to be about piracy, but I think now it's really about making games as a service (even if they're not online for gameplay) because it allows more forms of monetization. The conversation should be about making games into a digital product that you can download and own the files. Piracy still happens anyway, and maybe this could make companies solve the problem differently, like only allowing digital backup for trusted players.
Wouldn't it be nice if the Library of Congress or the Bodleian or some other prestigous clouty institution could demand that these published artworks be given to them as an unencumbered copy? I know that such a thing might have to include server code and some agreements on runtime environment, but I don't see that as insuperable.
This is culture and it's part of our patrimony. The privilege of getting to publish thinga and having copyright protection ought to include responsibilities to the society too.
> Wouldn't it be nice if the Library of Congress or the Bodleian or some other prestigous clouty institution could demand that these published artworks be given to them as an unencumbered copy?
I agree. It should be a requirement to receive copyright protection. The US Copyright Office should also make those copies available for download on their servers the moment that the work enters the public domain.
The problem is the cost and knowledge base required to keep servers running. A game server is a big proprietary ball of spaghetti with hundreds of API endpoints and only the people who built it really know how it works[0]. It's expensive to keep those folks around and expensive to pay for the cloud services and SaaS tools they need to do their jobs.
All software has a "lifecycle" and has to be turned off at some point because no one is willing to pay the costs of keeping it running (with hosting and client changes as ongoing moving targets). We see this even with games that have sales! So ones that don't have sales are not likely to attract anyone to pay for such staff.
[0] Source: I spent 2 years inside a studio owned by "big gaming."
> All software has a "lifecycle" and has to be turned off at some point because no one is willing to pay the costs of keeping it running (with hosting and client changes as ongoing moving targets). We see this even with games that have sales! So ones that don't have sales are not likely to attract anyone to pay for such staff.
[0] Source: I spent 2 years inside a studio owned by "big gaming.
You mean SAAS has a life cycle.
Software itself can be run by people willing to keep it running.
The whole "software should be turned off" comment is you trying to change perception about what software is.
The comparison is vs. games on physical media. Many Atari 2600 game cartridges still work, more than 40 years after they were originally manufactured. You can still use them in a new Atari 2600+/7800+ console.
There is a petition that would require publishers to leave games in a playable state at end-of-life (https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home), but it doesn't look like it will reach the threshold that would require the parliament to respond. It is one of the bigger petitions though, so it might still trigger some action.
"Some threshold" is doing a lot of work here, since the requirement is a million signatures (which also need to be from multiple countries).
I made a small mistake, the response will be from the Commission, not Parliament, because only the Commission can propose laws anyways - but you do get a hearing in parliament.
But essentially, even crossing the million signature threshold doesn't win you anything but a slightly bigger soap box and the promise of the Commission giving you a "no" in writing rather than just ignoring you. There is no requirement to actually act on it, and no way to force it (unlike e.g. in Switzerland where actual binding popular votes can be initiated with enough signatures).
It could be paid by taxes, and run by government. Something like the Internet Archive (not sure if that's public but the entire Internet is much larger than all games put together).
What your saying is true BUT. Your are talking about keeping servers (plural ?) running but, for conservancy, you should not need a full fledge cloud. It not about keeping it running for millions of customers. It's about being able to run for research to study games in the long run. One server that can handle a couple or two clients should be enough for conservancy.
People are the harder problem. A game server is not a box you turn on and it just runs. The platforms themselves change under you all the time as do all the SaaS tools you rely on. Clients change all the time, too, and one missed update can make your game unrunnable. Folks don't want to train or pay the humans needed to keep server-based games alive.
Easy; if you don't want to pay for keeping up with SaaS, don't use SaaS! This is an entirely self-inflicted problem, and it's on you (as in, the gamedev) to fix it.
Due to huge reverse engineering efforts which few games get, especially after the official servers have already shut down so there's no reference implementation anymore. For every game which gets unofficial servers, a few dozen never will.
So people can run servers even without the server source code, and the problem preventing leaving the server code to the Library of Congress, etc. is not "the cost and knowledge base required to keep servers running".
Yes that would be nice. It could definitely be a non-profit and get a lot of support. Then they could grant access to past games that are no longer on the market. Ideally anyone can just make their own backups without publishing the copy. I still think there are solutions to allow this but companies want games a service to make more money.
All games with a budget over $10m will be online-only gacha soon enough because it would be fiscally irresponsible to do anything else. The only reason you can still "buy" large games - to whatever extent you still can, you're mostly leasing games if you don't pirate them anyway - is irrationality and inertia on the part of publishers, which I doubt will last forever under shareholder pressure.
A lot of games are already nearly impossible to preserve because they use DRM and anti-cheat systems that only a handful of people in the world could crack. Maybe in the future more people will learn, but I think it's more likely the opposite will happen and these people will be fully outcompeted by DRM providers.
I wish there was a way to prevent this, but I don't see it. You would have to outlaw SaaS in general. I mean, that sounds like utopia to me, but there's no chance any country would go for it.
I think that's true for multiplayer games, which is understandable because they are more like platforms, even social media, because it has to support a community of people that play with each other.
Single player games will still exist though, and companies will still try to make them online games that can be patched often and have online stores (latest assassin's creed does this), but we should all agree this is no longer the same product. If a single player game becomes a service, it is no longer about a self-contained experience that exists like a movie or book. I guess here is where consumers need to demand that certain game genres be treated as art, and as such be sold like products instead of services.
There's definitely been a shift in what it means to be a multiplayer game. Live service games are crowding out the other forms.
Split-screen, LAN, and even Internet play without fixed servers all existed once upon a time (and still do, to a limited extent). But they aren't what people usually mean when they say "multiplayer" anymore. However, they all have the advantage of staying playable basically forever, with the only real limitation being the ability to emulate older tech.
I get that Switch 2 games need faster storage, and that makes the traditional model of running games directly from the cart prohibitively expensive, but they could have just copied the Xbox/Playstation model of shipping physical games on slow media (Blurays in their case) and then having a mandatory installation step which copies the data to the fast internal SSD before you start playing. That way you're not entirely dependent on online services to play a physical game.
For the Switch any amount of flash memory for those game cards is expensive. They previously offered much smaller, slightly cheaper cards that started at 2GB.
Unfortunately this time they’re only offering 64GB cards or these key cards. I’m curious how much storage they have, I’m sure very little.
Brand name 64GB microSDXC UHS-I cards are $10 retail. Figure Nintendo can get the actual flash storage directly much cheaper than that, probably more like $3-5. That hardly seems like a meaningful cost saving measure for a physical game, especially on a console that's pushing upwards of $80 as the game price.
> Figure Nintendo can get the actual flash storage directly much cheaper than that, probably more like $3-5
Not necessarily. Nintendo’s variant is built by Macronix under their XtraROM service; a variant of NAND flash designed to be a reliable Mask ROM substitute (including only being writable once, automatic repair afterwards, etc). Officially, their chips are rated to last 20 years at 85 degrees Celsius, which is insane.
This isn’t your off the shelf SD card chip built by a no-name Chinese design company that fails after 3 years of not receiving power. Combine the niche flash with a custom security chip (Lotus3) on every game card; that’s not cheap.
While we don’t know the exact pricing, the rumors are that 64GB is somewhere in the $15-$25 range per cartridge. At those prices, even if I ran a game company, I’d be reserving the non-game-key versions for a Deluxe Collector’s edition.
People's 3DS games are already being found to be unplayable after sitting on the shelf and switch games will meet the same fate. Nintendo has been failing both paying customers and preservationists for a very long time now. Piracy will again be the only way people will have to play many Nintendo switch titles. In other cases, people will have to wait for nintendo to release a limited selection of overpriced (and sometimes edited/censored) versions of certain older games on whatever future platform they're currently pushing.
I did some Googling and there doesn't seem to be an epidemic of 3DS game carts failing, I can find a few isolated reports but that feels as expected to me.
Strange, my copy of fitbox died after about 2-3 years of occasional use without any abuse.
To be fair, this was the case for my Joycons too (Calling it drift is branding, they are effectively unusable)
I like Nintendo's games but their QC has always been a little off. I got bad joypads even in the 80s when we got a NES. (Not having the internet and being a dumb kid I thought I was only limited to moving up and left on Zelda for whatever reason)
I have an Xbox 360 wired controller that I purchased circa 2008. I use it at least 1-2 times a week - these days for gaming on PC mostly, although I still pull the 360 out of the closet from time to time. The thumbstick rubber is definitely starting to get a little worse for wear at this point, but the controller still functions perfectly.
I cannot understand how we used to engineer controllers that last, and now we just... don't.
I think it's literally cost-cutting. Parts that used to be built well enough that they last years are now built just well enough to not fail in testing.
Luckily, you can now buy third-party controllers that use hall effect sensors.
Literally have the same thing; a wired XBOX360 controller that I bought a long time ago. I had to clean up the gunk inside a few years ago, but it still works perfectly fine.
I've seen some videos explaining the cause of the Joycon issue and it feels like it must be cost cutting (on the most important component of the device). People even fix it temporarily with a piece of cardboard.
Dead zones. Older controllers had bigger dead zones so the wear didn't matter as much. Switch joycons are physically smaller sticks so this makes the problem worse. There's even less tolerance to wear.
I think we only know the maximum physical cartridge size for Switch 2 is at 64GB as you write, but the CD Projekt interview about Switch 2 indicates there is/are other sizes available.
It’s to prevent warez rips as well, though. Performance of the SD card can be easily worked around; blocking the non-preservation segment community that just wants to download and play Switch games without paying for them — the majority of which don’t care about historical preservation or speedrunning — is made much easier by simply not loading new games from SD cards at all.
If stopping piracy was the main motivation for this change then all games would ship on GameKey carts, but they are still offering real carts to publishers who are willing to pay extra for the flash.
It's rare for physical media to be the weak link in console DRM nowadays, when piracy does happen it's nearly always enabled by a full system jailbreak at which point you can just as easily pirate digital games.
It's up to the publisher how much DRM they want. Just as publishers choose whether or not their game on Steam uses DRM, publishers for Switch 2 decide whether their game will use GameKey or not.
It’s not all or nothing. They made ripping of the most valuable games more difficult in exchange for lower prices for publishers, a win-win scenario for their platform, and those few who will insist on having a no-download experience can pay extra to do so. Obviously platform compromises will continue to make ripping possible, but this isn’t about all or nothing prevention, it’s about ratcheting up the difficulty level.
There's basically no chance that this scheme will prevent piracy.
Once again the pirates will have the superior product and paying customers will be screwed over.
The Switch is a portable device, so this "slow media" would have to be some form of solid state memory. And unfortunately, cheap flash memory tends to also have a short self life. That doesn't exactly help with preservation!
All else being equal, I'm happy Nintendo went with the more expensive media, even if it means some smaller titles likely won't be available physically. (In my eyes, a key card does not count as a physical release.)
I'm mostly just happy the key cards are clearly labeled so I can avoid buying them...
In the computer games industry pretty much everything has been download only for some time as the assets are too large for DVD and BD never caught on for PC. Places like GOG provide unrestricted offline installers but the majority are provided via a storefront like Epic or Steam.
The worst case scenario for preservationists is for games to become a streaming service via cloud gaming, which publishers may like since it pretty much prevents piracy and allows them to charge a monthly fee rather than a one time license fee. For movies and music streaming exclusives aren't a new thing and improvements in network latency and bandwidth are making game streaming more and more viable.
Interesting point about PC going digital-only as Nintendo is a fascinating counter-example.
While they offer digital downloads on the eShop, their pricing actively discourages it.
Case in point: I just bought my kid a new first-party Switch game. Physical copy on Amazon was ~25% cheaper than the identical digital version on Nintendo's own eShop. Even my 9-year-old noted how illogical it seems, the physical version requires manufacturing, shipping, retail markup, yet costs significantly less than the digital bits that have near-zero marginal cost.
It strongly suggests Nintendo wants the physical retail channel to thrive, or values the perceived permanence/resale value of cartridges.
This context makes the Switch 2 "gamekey" cartridges (physical auth token, digital download) fit their pattern of valuing a physical artifact and retail presence, even if the data delivery shifts.
And physical, at least to date, retains resell value as well. If you want to play an expensive Nintendo release that effectively never goes down in retail value, it's reasonably safe to buy it, play it, and resell it if you don't want it indefinitely. Nintendo never lowering their prices helps anchor the value high even in the resell market most of the time.
I haven't read enough about this to know if the gamekey will kill this but it's certainly only a matter of time before they are all coded and bindable to only one account. Technically this has obviously been possible for a long time, they just haven't dared to pull that trigger yet. They clearly want to.
> And physical, at least to date, retains resell value as well.
That stopping being true as soon as the DS line started and they switched to flash memory that will degrade over time when they don't have power. People's DS games are already failing. The same will happen to switch games. Only a few hardcore collectors are going to pay money for a cartridge that doesn't let you play the game anymore.
That's more like antique value. Resell as meant here occurs within the first few months to maybe years after a game releases. Degradation that happens on a time scale of a decade or more will not be a significant issue for ordinary resale.
I believe it’s to ensure retailers want to sell the games.
When I go to virgin mega store, there’s a large section of Nintendo games, but nothing for any PC games.
If it was cheaper to buy online, why would I buy physically, unless I was really into it physical media.
And that segment isn’t big enough to cause retailers to put up a section in the mall, which not only works as a point of sale but also as a giant advertising banner.
Price discrimination. Digital is more convenient to the consumer, hence by nature they prefer it. Consumers who are more price sensitive can instead choose to put up with the inconvenience of a physical purchase in exchange for a cheaper price.
Nintendo has raised the physical prices for Switch 2 games more than the digital edition. E.g. Mario Kart physical will cost 90USD/EUR and digitally 80USD/EUR. Thus, their retail-friendliness has diminished with the new generation.
Fortunately for everyone, all of the "stream games as a service" initiatives failed completely. Consumers aren't really interested due to obvious drawbacks, and vendors aren't interested in provisioning enough or good enough hardware to solve those drawbacks.
Imo if Gamepass is allowed to survive, it's end game is a tier, or maybe included at no extra cost with some limitations, a cloud gaming component.
Gamepass is the biggest threat in turning games into subscriptions, and unfortunately a growing subset of people will only play games on Gamepass. We've dodged Gamepass exclusives for now, but for how long?
Game pass doesn't seem terribly popular. Xbox in general isn't doing very well compared to the other consoles. I think they'll keep pushing for games as a service though. It's too tempting to keep all that control out of the hands of players.
It seems fairly popular right now. If you are the kind of person who wants to play many new releases it's a great deal.
But I think it's not particularly sticky: it's a great deal for as long as Microsoft invests into it getting many titles immediately. If they stop doing that, that same audience segment doesn't really have a use for it anymore.
That doesn't mean much. And 40 countries is actually a pretty large amount for this sort of thing. Companies like this are accustomed to (near-)first-world unit economics and market dynamics and they struggle at best to adapt to conditions outside of that bubble. They likely have metrics showing very few potential customers, for various reasons like low ownership of eligible hardware or low exposure to relevant advertising or high rates of piracy setting the price to compete with near zero, etc.
There are logistical challenges that have to be solved, and both upfront and ongoing costs that have to be paid, for every new country that needs to be served, and often these are unlikely to be recouped. If they foreseeably reach 90+% of their potential customer base and revenue (or think so anyway) from those 40 countries then not expanding beyond them is a practical decision that doesn't extrapolate to not caring within those 40.
I paid for GeForce Now for a while. But that one's different because you play the games you "own" on Steam and they just rent you the hardware to play them on.
Eventually I got a gaming video card and canceled - for now.
> Even when a cartridge does contain data on day one of release, games are so often patched, updated and expanded through downloads that the cart very often loses its connection to the game, and functions more like a physical copy protection dongle for a digital object
From preservation's perspective even the day-one release, no matter how buggy it is, is worth preserved. The speedrun community, for instance, often need to fix on an exact version of the game to compete, and a physical copy (implying a pinned revision) is often easier to agree on.
There are exceptions to this, when the day-one release is not playable. It is the trend happening in the software industry -- release early, even if it is literally unusable, because we can push a patch via the network -- that is disheartening.
That's true, but in general it's easy to archive games from Steam and (as long as the publisher doesn't use any 3rd-party DRM) they're trivial to crack.
I buy my games from Steam because of the convenience and to support the developers, but if, say, Gaben kicks the bucket and Steam suddenly closes/turns evil I can just as easily pirate all of my games back. So from a game preservation standpoint Steam isn't that bad compared to the locked down consoles and their walled gardens.
> I buy my games from Steam because of the convenience and to support the developers, but if, say, Gaben kicks the bucket and Steam suddenly closes/turns evil I can just as easily pirate all of my games back.
I'd recommend pirating copies now to keep as backups while it's still easy. You can't be sure you'll be able to find copies of less popular games in the future, having the control over our own computers to do things like run unauthorized software is being threatened all the time, the ever expanding surveillance over our lives makes it increasingly risky to do anything legally questionable, and the copyright regime is only getting more powerful. I don't think piracy is going to die out any time soon, but I do suspect it's only going to get more difficult as we're increasingly controlled and spied on.
Steam is always given an exception in these conversations because they’ve generally behaved - but that can easily change overnight from a black swan event.
Some future manager will look at a graph and think monetization can be improved X% while only losing an estimated Y% of users. It is guaranteed to happen. Question is only if most in the current generation will outlive free access to their entire Steam library or not.
This can easily be changed if Gabe Newell dies, commits a crime, or gets divorced, his estate or trust wants a change in direction, a lawsuit costs Steam a ton of money and they need to get cash quick, take your pick.
It does, but Steam outlives console e-shops and hardware which have limited lifecycle by design since they are deliberately generational.
GOG would be another example since you can get a DRM-free binary.
On the other hand, does it really matter that much? Probably not. It feels good from a hoarding stance to have a bunch of games I'll probably never play but I got for a "good deal", heh.
A counter-point to my comment is that the real goal should be to buy the game on the medium you want to play it on only if you're going to play it, finish as much as you want to, and not care if it goes away because it's all ephemeral in the end.
I barely play games anymore yet I still would get sucked into looking for deals on Switch e-shop and Steam, and that feeling of sheepishness is what I had in mind when I commented.
There already exist games which you can (illegally) play today only because they were archived by pirates. However with the consoles' security getting better, piracy not being as widespread as back in the day and the industry not being interested in game preservation it's also a matter of time before we start permanently losing games again.
Nintendo at least has a good history with this, at least in my experience. Both 3ds and WiiU e-stores were closed, but I can still play all my digital games on both. I can even make backup copies of the game on external media and everything works as you would expect (save online multiplayer, which is a shame but that's a different story)
Back when I was active in the modding scene I was able to get non-console interfaces for xbox memory cards and gba carts. With physical games you're tied to how long the physical medium lasts but not necessarily the console.
> So far the vast majority of third-party Switch 2 games are Game-Key Cards, with only a few exceptions such as Cyberpunk 2077 and the Western version of Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion.
AFAIK this is only in Japan. The Japanese Switch 2 experience is going to be vastly different from the international one in ways the average Japanese player won't immediately notice, because Japan's economy is in the toilet and Nintendo is engaging in several desperation moves to avoid selling a product nobody living on a Japanese wage can afford.
If you're wondering what I mean by "vastly different": the Switch 2 you can buy at Yodobashi or Bic Camera is going to be region- and language-locked to Japanese only. You will only be allowed to sign in with a Japanese account, which can only be funded with Japanese credit cards. You can't change the system language to anything other than Japanese, and any games that rely on the system language will consequently be locked to Japanese, too. In exchange, the system is $100 cheaper[0].
Switch 1 also had Game Key Cards, but they weren't branded this way. Instead they were games that required a software update containing the rest of the game in order to work, with an appropriate warning on the box about this. For the record, Switch 1 updates could be downloaded peer-to-peer, and I'm assuming this carries forward for Switch 2, but I have no idea if Game Key Cards work the same way.
[0] If you live in Japan and want an international-spec Switch 2, that's an exclusive My Nintendo Store item that costs the same as it does in the US.
As someone who’s been collecting games since the early 2000s, it’s tough watching physical media slowly vanish—it changes how we archive and experience history. While digital is convenient, it doesn’t guarantee long-term access. I’ve turned to sites like https://rickyscasino.org/ lately—not for gaming, but to stay updated on tech trends and how digital systems are evolving, especially in entertainment and transaction models. You can’t play there, but there’s a lot of useful info on how things are shifting. This kind of move by Nintendo feels like a step further from ownership toward controlled access, and it raises fair concerns for preservationists. At this point, maybe the best approach is to support emulation efforts and archive communities to help keep gaming history alive and accessible.
I guess I'm the odd duck with a switch that has never been online. It sounds like the switch2 isn't for me.
Sad but I don't want another device that wants to be more than it is, I basically want an updated version of my gameboy from the 90s and that's it. No downloads, no network, no social, just a game you can quietly play anywhere when you have a bit of time, no nonsense
This thing already happens with download only games being sold. At least with the game cards you can sell the card again which you can't with the keys.
So essentially this is an improvement and you won't even know it if you only buy first party games.
Hah, I thought it was just me. Mine was the same, never online, and this key based card thing makes me think that my next, and probably final console purchase, will be a replacement Switch 1. Although I saw the prices just went up, and I didnt even know about the oled version. The main thing that holds me back is the dof blurr in Links Awakening.
I imagine that Nintendo want a slice of this subscription based gaming scam. The HD versions already feel like a step in that greed direction. And I think I saw a collection of Mario 3D games that fell into that same repackage-and-sell-again category, with crazy pricing.
You might like the DE10-nano Mister project. I manged to get some old arcade cabinates running on a big monitor, no frame drops or lag like most emulators suffer, and no stream of 10p coins required. FPGA feels closer in terms of preservation.
Why don't we just keep as much of high-resolution gameplay videos as possible. This makes reconstruction possible at least in theory. Not now, but with the time it should be possible to reconstruct similar experience even for multiplayer online games. Not the code, of course.
> “seeing Nintendo do this is a little disheartening”, adding: “You would hope that a company that big, that has such a storied history, would take preservation a little more seriously.”
I don't see why preservation (outside their own archives) would be a goal for Nintendo. The reality seems to be the opposite: They'd like the branding and memory of old games to be preserved, but please not the game itself - because then they can re-release it for every new system as a "remastered" variant.
> they can re-release it for every new system as a "remastered" variant
Nintendo's strategy seems to be working. For example, I seem to have purchased Super Mario Bros 3 multiple times, in physical and digital form, for multiple systems (Wii, 3DS, Wii U ...), and I'm also renting it as part of Nintendo Switch Online.
On the up side, I don't have any problem emulating it. Actually all of those versions are emulated, come to think of it.
It's an imperfect solution to a real problem—Nintendo wants to use cartridges instead of discs for some good reasons, some not-so-good reasons—but the costs per cartridge are too high for cartridges big enough to hold modern games.
But you can look at it as a transferable license to otherwise digital games, and that's not bad. A console with entirely (or almost entirely) digital games would have no used game market, and that sucks both for sellers (which I don't do), and buyers (which I happily do).
It would be nice if there was some legal protection for the buyer that, by selling a physical license, that Nintendo be required to make the download itself available for some time period > 20 years.
Firstly is the proliferation of games and their quality. Anyone can make a new game, given an engine and a few art assets. It doesn't take a lot of capital or know-how to release a new game. Therefore, there's a glut of games on the market, from high to low quality, and there are far more than any rational human could ever purchase or play. This was a problem from Day One: When I purchased my Atari 2600 console (or rather my parents purchased for me) my sister and I quickly filled up a 50-cartridge shelf with games where we barely even played or scratched the surface. They were disposable! When we got a Commodore 64, there were more 3rd parties on the market, making games we never heard of, and these games were so deep and thick that one of them could've kept us occupied for 6 months, but still we chewed through them as fast as we could afford.
Secondly, aren't most all the games now oriented around MMOG "communities" and multi-player-based? That makes preservation practically impossible. If you've not only got to keep the game servers running, but you've also got to preserve the community that goes with them... well, forget it. Gamers grow up, their tastes change; they move on.
I enjoyed a few games, years ago, that basically turned into ghost-town servers. Many of us were so tenacious and dedicated to that specific game as it was, yet the new influx of players dried up, and nobody could prevent that from happening. Every newbie was a ban-evader. Every rich opponent was paying real $$$ just to stay competitive. Our precious game jumped the shark and we couldn't let it die. But die they must. I propose that most games are not worth preserving. Perhaps games should be enjoyed where they are, and then left to die, because they will never be the same again.
It's not fun how the trend is to force everybody to have internet, as if it was an essential service like electricity or water. Some argue it is, but I'd say we're generally far from there. I wanted a console to play when I go to my out of town apartment where we don't need nor want to contract an internet line. And now it means I cannot even bring some cartridges with me and swap them as I please, because they are always requiring internet connectivity for everything.
What hasn't failed me is to hack my devices and use pirated versions of my content. Ironic that this method works much better. All games I want, locally, in a pack of SD cards I bring in my backpack, ready to install and play 100% offline at any moment in a train, a flight, a boat.
> "You would hope that a company that big, that has such a storied history, would take preservation a little more seriously.”
Why would one hope that? Nintendo has never ever shown any kind of sign of even remote interest in anybody not-Nintendo doing any kind of preservation.
GP didn’t say that they were playing them on disk, only that they owned them on disc. Backing up PS3 games is relatively easy these days. I fully expect PS3 emulation to be good enough long before working PS3s are unobtainium.
I think Switch is just following the other consoles eventually.
This lead me think, is there any 8-bit/16-bit/32-bit native handheld (not Pi emulation) market? I guess the primary difficulty is to make games for them, so most likely just a small hobbyist market. I still think kids don't really care about graphics though, at least when they are young.
There's this, https://play.date/. Haven't heard much news about it lately though. Feel like any handheld built around a relatively cheap microcontroller should be shooting for a much lower price point.
Economy of scale only saves you so much at small batch sizes, plus I assume the unique input setup drives up the BOM price a fair bit.
I think they did a few blogposts about having initial teething troubles getting consistent manufacturing, so they might have a significant upfront expense cost to subsidize (which probably explains why they're raising the price again...)
There are a few handhelds that can play pico-8 games. I think it’s done by running pico-8 itself on the handheld which can also run other emulators so I’m not sure it meets your criteria but there’s that at least :)
It's a shame. The beautiful thing about Switch game cards is that you can just pop them in and play. Compare that to PS5 where you have a lengthy installation followed by a 40GB download...
As other people have observed, some Switch games did this too, in part or whole, it just wasn't branded as a distinct feature like this, the games just said "you need to download a day 1 update", like in your example.
The article already touches on this, but in the modern day the games that exist on physical media are pretty much useless without their zero-day patches. Putting physical media aside, companies rarely make older builds available, so even when media contains a game and servers are up there is already plenty of ‘lost media’ if you consider old and interesting (potentially hilariously broken) old builds of virtually every game.
I’ve realized this at some point, but video games are ephemeral and should really be enjoyed in the now. Even if you can perfectly preserve a game, and the means to play it, tastes change so quickly in gaming that a game that’s fun today might not be enjoyable even a year later.
“Plays are ephemeral and should really be enjoyed in the now. Even if you can perfectly preserve a play, and the means to perform it, tastes change so quickly in theatre that a play that’s entertaining today might not be enjoyable even a year later.” - you, in the 1620s, probably.
Now imagine that the play cannot be altered (game build), it can only be performed on a specifically shaped stage (hardware requirements), actors can only be replaced by lookalikes (‘remaster’ tweaks), it can only be performed with a full theatre (online requirements), and the playwright retains the only copy of the play (source code).
Then you start to approach the problem that is gaming.
Which is exactly why more needs to be done by governments to stop this. A simple fix would be to say that in order to qualify for copyright protection, a national archive reserves the right to request a functional copy of the work in a form compatible with any future data migration projects.
People have been altering plays for ages without much issue (just look at the mod community), emulating and porting plays to different stages, and even reverse engineering their own copies of the script.
The only real catch has been online stuff and even that is sometimes worked around or recreated. It's not an impossible task to solve the problem of making games playable into the future, but it'll probably require legislation to force game companies to preserve their game and server code to allow for it.
These day0/day1 patches and updates usually weigh a lot less than the base games, on Switch the appeal of cartridges is to avoid filling up storage.
Before the Switch, save files were also stored on cartridges, making physical medium far more appealing than the mess digital was on the 3DS (if you owned more than 1 console).
No real offense intended, because I understand the feeling here, but this...
> I’ve realized this at some point, but video games are ephemeral and should really be enjoyed in the now. Even if you can perfectly preserve a game, and the means to play it, tastes change so quickly in gaming that a game that’s fun today might not be enjoyable even a year later.
This is horseshit.
It's a defeatist attitude, and it's not reflective of reality. Yes - some things go out of fashion for a while, but trends almost always cycle back. You might think something is out of style right now, (and that's fine) but to be facetious: One man's trash is another man's treasure.
> Yes - some things go out of fashion for a while, but trends almost always cycle back.
Exactly, this is even supported by Nintendo's own services offering emulation of their older systems. There is clearly demand for the ability to older games.
Capitulation to an "inevitable" fate of download only games is just taking the easy way out by not sticking to your own core values. I have personally pre-ordered a Switch 2, but I will not being purchasing any online only cartridges or download only software.
We haven't had the watershed moment that brings it into focus for gamers at large yet, The Crew was close. But Nintendo has kept the download servers going for all of their systems which has provided a false sense of security. Once those start being shut down maybe we'll see some actual response. Though with the introduction of Gamecube emulation on the Switch 2, they are only a small step away from emulating the Wii and giving people another scapegoat for their lazy acceptance of lack of ownership.
> should the Switch 2 shop servers ever close down in the distant future – and therefore no longer provide the downloads necessary – those cartridges may become unplayable.
> may
Weasel 'game journalists' like this is the reason gaming is dying.
The world is WILL not may. It happened before and it will happen again because publications like this are nothing more than pr department for gaming companies.
Things like this happen at least partially because of people who'd blindly pay greedy companies like Nintendo, let 'em grow and have their way with their dark patterns.
If I give this GameKey card to the friend, will he be able to download and play it? With card inserted, of course. If not - these cards are just glorified activation codes
I was under the impression that the games would download and be stored on the card. Is this not the case? My current collection of game cards exceeds any expanded storage by quite a wide margin…
Edit: I guess not:
“you must have enough free space in your Nintendo Switch 2 system memory or microSD Express card”
Hot take: when a game is not able to be preserved, it is not worthy of preservation efforts. When it's not worthy of being saved for the future is it even worth playing today? My answer is no.
I feel similarly, but at the same time there will come a point where there won't be any games being made that aren't designed to be unplayable after a certain amount of time.
I expect that far more people will suck it up and pay whatever they have to in order to play whatever games they're allowed to today rather than abandon playing video games entirely. I think game companies are counting on that too.
If you're counting on gamers to vote will their wallets in order to save video games I think you're going to be extremely disappointed.
I think it's silly that the conversation on preserving games revolves around hardware. The hardware is irrelevant. It's about the right to create digital backup for personal use. Whether the game is downloaded or burned on a disc, it's just software.
The main problem used to be about piracy, but I think now it's really about making games as a service (even if they're not online for gameplay) because it allows more forms of monetization. The conversation should be about making games into a digital product that you can download and own the files. Piracy still happens anyway, and maybe this could make companies solve the problem differently, like only allowing digital backup for trusted players.
Wouldn't it be nice if the Library of Congress or the Bodleian or some other prestigous clouty institution could demand that these published artworks be given to them as an unencumbered copy? I know that such a thing might have to include server code and some agreements on runtime environment, but I don't see that as insuperable.
This is culture and it's part of our patrimony. The privilege of getting to publish thinga and having copyright protection ought to include responsibilities to the society too.
> Wouldn't it be nice if the Library of Congress or the Bodleian or some other prestigous clouty institution could demand that these published artworks be given to them as an unencumbered copy?
I agree. It should be a requirement to receive copyright protection. The US Copyright Office should also make those copies available for download on their servers the moment that the work enters the public domain.
The problem is the cost and knowledge base required to keep servers running. A game server is a big proprietary ball of spaghetti with hundreds of API endpoints and only the people who built it really know how it works[0]. It's expensive to keep those folks around and expensive to pay for the cloud services and SaaS tools they need to do their jobs.
All software has a "lifecycle" and has to be turned off at some point because no one is willing to pay the costs of keeping it running (with hosting and client changes as ongoing moving targets). We see this even with games that have sales! So ones that don't have sales are not likely to attract anyone to pay for such staff.
[0] Source: I spent 2 years inside a studio owned by "big gaming."
> All software has a "lifecycle" and has to be turned off at some point because no one is willing to pay the costs of keeping it running (with hosting and client changes as ongoing moving targets). We see this even with games that have sales! So ones that don't have sales are not likely to attract anyone to pay for such staff. [0] Source: I spent 2 years inside a studio owned by "big gaming.
You mean SAAS has a life cycle.
Software itself can be run by people willing to keep it running.
The whole "software should be turned off" comment is you trying to change perception about what software is.
The comparison is vs. games on physical media. Many Atari 2600 game cartridges still work, more than 40 years after they were originally manufactured. You can still use them in a new Atari 2600+/7800+ console.
Games with single-player mode must be playable in a fully offline mode. Would solve your (very valid) issue for a large chunk of games.
There is a petition that would require publishers to leave games in a playable state at end-of-life (https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home), but it doesn't look like it will reach the threshold that would require the parliament to respond. It is one of the bigger petitions though, so it might still trigger some action.
Wait, in the EU you can just petition the government and they have to respond after some threshold?
Yes, both at the EU level and also in many countries (EU and non-EU), see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Citizens%27_Initiativ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_initiative
We have this in the UK too,but it's a waste of time.
You just get a stock/automated response to most petitions.
That said, they are required to set aside some parliamentary time for it and for petitions to be "debated".
"Some threshold" is doing a lot of work here, since the requirement is a million signatures (which also need to be from multiple countries).
I made a small mistake, the response will be from the Commission, not Parliament, because only the Commission can propose laws anyways - but you do get a hearing in parliament.
But essentially, even crossing the million signature threshold doesn't win you anything but a slightly bigger soap box and the promise of the Commission giving you a "no" in writing rather than just ignoring you. There is no requirement to actually act on it, and no way to force it (unlike e.g. in Switzerland where actual binding popular votes can be initiated with enough signatures).
It could be paid by taxes, and run by government. Something like the Internet Archive (not sure if that's public but the entire Internet is much larger than all games put together).
And why not by private entities receiving donations of people that care about preservation?
That could work I guess.
What your saying is true BUT. Your are talking about keeping servers (plural ?) running but, for conservancy, you should not need a full fledge cloud. It not about keeping it running for millions of customers. It's about being able to run for research to study games in the long run. One server that can handle a couple or two clients should be enough for conservancy.
People are the harder problem. A game server is not a box you turn on and it just runs. The platforms themselves change under you all the time as do all the SaaS tools you rely on. Clients change all the time, too, and one missed update can make your game unrunnable. Folks don't want to train or pay the humans needed to keep server-based games alive.
Easy; if you don't want to pay for keeping up with SaaS, don't use SaaS! This is an entirely self-inflicted problem, and it's on you (as in, the gamedev) to fix it.
Then how do unofficial WoW, Diablo 2 or Lineage 2 servers exist? Enthusiasts run them for free.
Due to huge reverse engineering efforts which few games get, especially after the official servers have already shut down so there's no reference implementation anymore. For every game which gets unofficial servers, a few dozen never will.
So people can run servers even without the server source code, and the problem preventing leaving the server code to the Library of Congress, etc. is not "the cost and knowledge base required to keep servers running".
This might be solved in future by more advanced LLMs as long as binaries are preserved.
...therefore it shouldn't be preserved at all? This doesn't follow.
No one mentioned running the code, just persisting it for the future public good
Yes that would be nice. It could definitely be a non-profit and get a lot of support. Then they could grant access to past games that are no longer on the market. Ideally anyone can just make their own backups without publishing the copy. I still think there are solutions to allow this but companies want games a service to make more money.
All games with a budget over $10m will be online-only gacha soon enough because it would be fiscally irresponsible to do anything else. The only reason you can still "buy" large games - to whatever extent you still can, you're mostly leasing games if you don't pirate them anyway - is irrationality and inertia on the part of publishers, which I doubt will last forever under shareholder pressure.
A lot of games are already nearly impossible to preserve because they use DRM and anti-cheat systems that only a handful of people in the world could crack. Maybe in the future more people will learn, but I think it's more likely the opposite will happen and these people will be fully outcompeted by DRM providers.
I wish there was a way to prevent this, but I don't see it. You would have to outlaw SaaS in general. I mean, that sounds like utopia to me, but there's no chance any country would go for it.
People were predicting this a decade ago but somehow we're still getting games like Tears of the Kingdom and Expedition 33.
I think that's true for multiplayer games, which is understandable because they are more like platforms, even social media, because it has to support a community of people that play with each other.
Single player games will still exist though, and companies will still try to make them online games that can be patched often and have online stores (latest assassin's creed does this), but we should all agree this is no longer the same product. If a single player game becomes a service, it is no longer about a self-contained experience that exists like a movie or book. I guess here is where consumers need to demand that certain game genres be treated as art, and as such be sold like products instead of services.
There's definitely been a shift in what it means to be a multiplayer game. Live service games are crowding out the other forms.
Split-screen, LAN, and even Internet play without fixed servers all existed once upon a time (and still do, to a limited extent). But they aren't what people usually mean when they say "multiplayer" anymore. However, they all have the advantage of staying playable basically forever, with the only real limitation being the ability to emulate older tech.
The reason being timesharing seems to be the only way to force people to pay for digital goods, including developers.
I get that Switch 2 games need faster storage, and that makes the traditional model of running games directly from the cart prohibitively expensive, but they could have just copied the Xbox/Playstation model of shipping physical games on slow media (Blurays in their case) and then having a mandatory installation step which copies the data to the fast internal SSD before you start playing. That way you're not entirely dependent on online services to play a physical game.
For the Switch any amount of flash memory for those game cards is expensive. They previously offered much smaller, slightly cheaper cards that started at 2GB.
Unfortunately this time they’re only offering 64GB cards or these key cards. I’m curious how much storage they have, I’m sure very little.
Brand name 64GB microSDXC UHS-I cards are $10 retail. Figure Nintendo can get the actual flash storage directly much cheaper than that, probably more like $3-5. That hardly seems like a meaningful cost saving measure for a physical game, especially on a console that's pushing upwards of $80 as the game price.
> Figure Nintendo can get the actual flash storage directly much cheaper than that, probably more like $3-5
Not necessarily. Nintendo’s variant is built by Macronix under their XtraROM service; a variant of NAND flash designed to be a reliable Mask ROM substitute (including only being writable once, automatic repair afterwards, etc). Officially, their chips are rated to last 20 years at 85 degrees Celsius, which is insane.
This isn’t your off the shelf SD card chip built by a no-name Chinese design company that fails after 3 years of not receiving power. Combine the niche flash with a custom security chip (Lotus3) on every game card; that’s not cheap.
While we don’t know the exact pricing, the rumors are that 64GB is somewhere in the $15-$25 range per cartridge. At those prices, even if I ran a game company, I’d be reserving the non-game-key versions for a Deluxe Collector’s edition.
People's 3DS games are already being found to be unplayable after sitting on the shelf and switch games will meet the same fate. Nintendo has been failing both paying customers and preservationists for a very long time now. Piracy will again be the only way people will have to play many Nintendo switch titles. In other cases, people will have to wait for nintendo to release a limited selection of overpriced (and sometimes edited/censored) versions of certain older games on whatever future platform they're currently pushing.
I did some Googling and there doesn't seem to be an epidemic of 3DS game carts failing, I can find a few isolated reports but that feels as expected to me.
It also sounds like you can extend the lifespan my making sure to boot up your cartridge in a 3DS every so often, because Nintendo gave them an error correction routine: https://gbatemp.net/threads/nintendo-switch-3ds-cartridge-li...
Strange, my copy of fitbox died after about 2-3 years of occasional use without any abuse.
To be fair, this was the case for my Joycons too (Calling it drift is branding, they are effectively unusable)
I like Nintendo's games but their QC has always been a little off. I got bad joypads even in the 80s when we got a NES. (Not having the internet and being a dumb kid I thought I was only limited to moving up and left on Zelda for whatever reason)
I have an Xbox 360 wired controller that I purchased circa 2008. I use it at least 1-2 times a week - these days for gaming on PC mostly, although I still pull the 360 out of the closet from time to time. The thumbstick rubber is definitely starting to get a little worse for wear at this point, but the controller still functions perfectly.
I cannot understand how we used to engineer controllers that last, and now we just... don't.
I think it's literally cost-cutting. Parts that used to be built well enough that they last years are now built just well enough to not fail in testing.
Luckily, you can now buy third-party controllers that use hall effect sensors.
Literally have the same thing; a wired XBOX360 controller that I bought a long time ago. I had to clean up the gunk inside a few years ago, but it still works perfectly fine.
I've seen some videos explaining the cause of the Joycon issue and it feels like it must be cost cutting (on the most important component of the device). People even fix it temporarily with a piece of cardboard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StRvTiRagPo
Keep in mind, these are 100$+ in Canada. Per my experience, I think it will be another 40 years until I buy another Nintendo console.
Dead zones. Older controllers had bigger dead zones so the wear didn't matter as much. Switch joycons are physically smaller sticks so this makes the problem worse. There's even less tolerance to wear.
Digital Foundry said these cards are estimated to cost game companies 16 bucks per unit.
Maybe Sony was actually onto something with UMDs :P
I think we only know the maximum physical cartridge size for Switch 2 is at 64GB as you write, but the CD Projekt interview about Switch 2 indicates there is/are other sizes available.
It’s to prevent warez rips as well, though. Performance of the SD card can be easily worked around; blocking the non-preservation segment community that just wants to download and play Switch games without paying for them — the majority of which don’t care about historical preservation or speedrunning — is made much easier by simply not loading new games from SD cards at all.
If stopping piracy was the main motivation for this change then all games would ship on GameKey carts, but they are still offering real carts to publishers who are willing to pay extra for the flash.
It's rare for physical media to be the weak link in console DRM nowadays, when piracy does happen it's nearly always enabled by a full system jailbreak at which point you can just as easily pirate digital games.
It's up to the publisher how much DRM they want. Just as publishers choose whether or not their game on Steam uses DRM, publishers for Switch 2 decide whether their game will use GameKey or not.
It’s not all or nothing. They made ripping of the most valuable games more difficult in exchange for lower prices for publishers, a win-win scenario for their platform, and those few who will insist on having a no-download experience can pay extra to do so. Obviously platform compromises will continue to make ripping possible, but this isn’t about all or nothing prevention, it’s about ratcheting up the difficulty level.
Not to mention there is an alternative to SD cards, which is what modern mirrorless cameras have been moving to.
CFexpress cards. Basically M2 nvme cards in a external pluggable form factor.
> It’s to prevent warez rips as well, though.
There's basically no chance that this scheme will prevent piracy. Once again the pirates will have the superior product and paying customers will be screwed over.
The Switch is a portable device, so this "slow media" would have to be some form of solid state memory. And unfortunately, cheap flash memory tends to also have a short self life. That doesn't exactly help with preservation!
All else being equal, I'm happy Nintendo went with the more expensive media, even if it means some smaller titles likely won't be available physically. (In my eyes, a key card does not count as a physical release.)
I'm mostly just happy the key cards are clearly labeled so I can avoid buying them...
In the computer games industry pretty much everything has been download only for some time as the assets are too large for DVD and BD never caught on for PC. Places like GOG provide unrestricted offline installers but the majority are provided via a storefront like Epic or Steam.
The worst case scenario for preservationists is for games to become a streaming service via cloud gaming, which publishers may like since it pretty much prevents piracy and allows them to charge a monthly fee rather than a one time license fee. For movies and music streaming exclusives aren't a new thing and improvements in network latency and bandwidth are making game streaming more and more viable.
Interesting point about PC going digital-only as Nintendo is a fascinating counter-example.
While they offer digital downloads on the eShop, their pricing actively discourages it.
Case in point: I just bought my kid a new first-party Switch game. Physical copy on Amazon was ~25% cheaper than the identical digital version on Nintendo's own eShop. Even my 9-year-old noted how illogical it seems, the physical version requires manufacturing, shipping, retail markup, yet costs significantly less than the digital bits that have near-zero marginal cost.
It strongly suggests Nintendo wants the physical retail channel to thrive, or values the perceived permanence/resale value of cartridges.
This context makes the Switch 2 "gamekey" cartridges (physical auth token, digital download) fit their pattern of valuing a physical artifact and retail presence, even if the data delivery shifts.
And physical, at least to date, retains resell value as well. If you want to play an expensive Nintendo release that effectively never goes down in retail value, it's reasonably safe to buy it, play it, and resell it if you don't want it indefinitely. Nintendo never lowering their prices helps anchor the value high even in the resell market most of the time.
I haven't read enough about this to know if the gamekey will kill this but it's certainly only a matter of time before they are all coded and bindable to only one account. Technically this has obviously been possible for a long time, they just haven't dared to pull that trigger yet. They clearly want to.
> And physical, at least to date, retains resell value as well.
That stopping being true as soon as the DS line started and they switched to flash memory that will degrade over time when they don't have power. People's DS games are already failing. The same will happen to switch games. Only a few hardcore collectors are going to pay money for a cartridge that doesn't let you play the game anymore.
That's more like antique value. Resell as meant here occurs within the first few months to maybe years after a game releases. Degradation that happens on a time scale of a decade or more will not be a significant issue for ordinary resale.
I believe it’s to ensure retailers want to sell the games.
When I go to virgin mega store, there’s a large section of Nintendo games, but nothing for any PC games.
If it was cheaper to buy online, why would I buy physically, unless I was really into it physical media.
And that segment isn’t big enough to cause retailers to put up a section in the mall, which not only works as a point of sale but also as a giant advertising banner.
It's not only Nintendo, but all consoles that still have physical versions of games.
I never buy digitally from Sony, for example. The discs get discounted far earlier than the occasional digital sale.
Plus since we're talking about preservation, I don't trust Sony to make my digital purchases available indefinitely.
The only content you really own is the cracked version from pirate bay...
Price discrimination. Digital is more convenient to the consumer, hence by nature they prefer it. Consumers who are more price sensitive can instead choose to put up with the inconvenience of a physical purchase in exchange for a cheaper price.
Nintendo has raised the physical prices for Switch 2 games more than the digital edition. E.g. Mario Kart physical will cost 90USD/EUR and digitally 80USD/EUR. Thus, their retail-friendliness has diminished with the new generation.
Fortunately for everyone, all of the "stream games as a service" initiatives failed completely. Consumers aren't really interested due to obvious drawbacks, and vendors aren't interested in provisioning enough or good enough hardware to solve those drawbacks.
Imo if Gamepass is allowed to survive, it's end game is a tier, or maybe included at no extra cost with some limitations, a cloud gaming component.
Gamepass is the biggest threat in turning games into subscriptions, and unfortunately a growing subset of people will only play games on Gamepass. We've dodged Gamepass exclusives for now, but for how long?
Game pass doesn't seem terribly popular. Xbox in general isn't doing very well compared to the other consoles. I think they'll keep pushing for games as a service though. It's too tempting to keep all that control out of the hands of players.
Weird to describe something with maybe like 40 million subscribers as not terribly popular. Xbox is game pass and not a console anymore at this point.
> Game pass doesn't seem terribly popular
It seems fairly popular right now. If you are the kind of person who wants to play many new releases it's a great deal.
But I think it's not particularly sticky: it's a great deal for as long as Microsoft invests into it getting many titles immediately. If they stop doing that, that same audience segment doesn't really have a use for it anymore.
It's only available in 40 out of 195 countries in the world and they have zero plans to expand it. They must not care much about it.
That doesn't mean much. And 40 countries is actually a pretty large amount for this sort of thing. Companies like this are accustomed to (near-)first-world unit economics and market dynamics and they struggle at best to adapt to conditions outside of that bubble. They likely have metrics showing very few potential customers, for various reasons like low ownership of eligible hardware or low exposure to relevant advertising or high rates of piracy setting the price to compete with near zero, etc.
There are logistical challenges that have to be solved, and both upfront and ongoing costs that have to be paid, for every new country that needs to be served, and often these are unlikely to be recouped. If they foreseeably reach 90+% of their potential customer base and revenue (or think so anyway) from those 40 countries then not expanding beyond them is a practical decision that doesn't extrapolate to not caring within those 40.
Game pass already comes with tiers with cloud gaming
I paid for GeForce Now for a while. But that one's different because you play the games you "own" on Steam and they just rent you the hardware to play them on.
Eventually I got a gaming video card and canceled - for now.
> Even when a cartridge does contain data on day one of release, games are so often patched, updated and expanded through downloads that the cart very often loses its connection to the game, and functions more like a physical copy protection dongle for a digital object
From preservation's perspective even the day-one release, no matter how buggy it is, is worth preserved. The speedrun community, for instance, often need to fix on an exact version of the game to compete, and a physical copy (implying a pinned revision) is often easier to agree on.
There are exceptions to this, when the day-one release is not playable. It is the trend happening in the software industry -- release early, even if it is literally unusable, because we can push a patch via the network -- that is disheartening.
With physical games, you're tied to how long your console and cartridge physically last.
With digital games, you're tied to how long the console's e-store lasts, which is guaranteed to be sunset.
Eventually I couldn't justify buying the console version of a game that I was willing to play on Steam.
> Eventually I couldn't justify buying the console version of a game that I was willing to play on Steam.
I do that too but doesn't the same rule apply to Steam, too? (that is if it goes down, you can't download the games anymore?).
That's true, but in general it's easy to archive games from Steam and (as long as the publisher doesn't use any 3rd-party DRM) they're trivial to crack.
I buy my games from Steam because of the convenience and to support the developers, but if, say, Gaben kicks the bucket and Steam suddenly closes/turns evil I can just as easily pirate all of my games back. So from a game preservation standpoint Steam isn't that bad compared to the locked down consoles and their walled gardens.
> I buy my games from Steam because of the convenience and to support the developers, but if, say, Gaben kicks the bucket and Steam suddenly closes/turns evil I can just as easily pirate all of my games back.
I'd recommend pirating copies now to keep as backups while it's still easy. You can't be sure you'll be able to find copies of less popular games in the future, having the control over our own computers to do things like run unauthorized software is being threatened all the time, the ever expanding surveillance over our lives makes it increasingly risky to do anything legally questionable, and the copyright regime is only getting more powerful. I don't think piracy is going to die out any time soon, but I do suspect it's only going to get more difficult as we're increasingly controlled and spied on.
> but if, say, Gaben kicks the bucket
Has anyone in the gaming press asked him if he has a continuity plan, I wonder?
> I'd recommend pirating copies now to keep as backups while it's still easy.
That's the smart thing to do. But Steam/GoG are so convenient...
Steam is always given an exception in these conversations because they’ve generally behaved - but that can easily change overnight from a black swan event.
Some future manager will look at a graph and think monetization can be improved X% while only losing an estimated Y% of users. It is guaranteed to happen. Question is only if most in the current generation will outlive free access to their entire Steam library or not.
Valve quite famously doesn't have managers and instead runs a "flat" org chart.
This can easily be changed if Gabe Newell dies, commits a crime, or gets divorced, his estate or trust wants a change in direction, a lawsuit costs Steam a ton of money and they need to get cash quick, take your pick.
That is why I buy my games on GOG. They don't have DRM, you can legally backup all your games.
Plus they are EU-based which decreases political risk in the current political climate.
It does, but Steam outlives console e-shops and hardware which have limited lifecycle by design since they are deliberately generational.
GOG would be another example since you can get a DRM-free binary.
On the other hand, does it really matter that much? Probably not. It feels good from a hoarding stance to have a bunch of games I'll probably never play but I got for a "good deal", heh.
A counter-point to my comment is that the real goal should be to buy the game on the medium you want to play it on only if you're going to play it, finish as much as you want to, and not care if it goes away because it's all ephemeral in the end.
I barely play games anymore yet I still would get sucked into looking for deals on Switch e-shop and Steam, and that feeling of sheepishness is what I had in mind when I commented.
With pirated games, you can play them forever.
There already exist games which you can (illegally) play today only because they were archived by pirates. However with the consoles' security getting better, piracy not being as widespread as back in the day and the industry not being interested in game preservation it's also a matter of time before we start permanently losing games again.
Nintendo at least has a good history with this, at least in my experience. Both 3ds and WiiU e-stores were closed, but I can still play all my digital games on both. I can even make backup copies of the game on external media and everything works as you would expect (save online multiplayer, which is a shame but that's a different story)
Back when I was active in the modding scene I was able to get non-console interfaces for xbox memory cards and gba carts. With physical games you're tied to how long the physical medium lasts but not necessarily the console.
> So far the vast majority of third-party Switch 2 games are Game-Key Cards, with only a few exceptions such as Cyberpunk 2077 and the Western version of Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion.
AFAIK this is only in Japan. The Japanese Switch 2 experience is going to be vastly different from the international one in ways the average Japanese player won't immediately notice, because Japan's economy is in the toilet and Nintendo is engaging in several desperation moves to avoid selling a product nobody living on a Japanese wage can afford.
If you're wondering what I mean by "vastly different": the Switch 2 you can buy at Yodobashi or Bic Camera is going to be region- and language-locked to Japanese only. You will only be allowed to sign in with a Japanese account, which can only be funded with Japanese credit cards. You can't change the system language to anything other than Japanese, and any games that rely on the system language will consequently be locked to Japanese, too. In exchange, the system is $100 cheaper[0].
Switch 1 also had Game Key Cards, but they weren't branded this way. Instead they were games that required a software update containing the rest of the game in order to work, with an appropriate warning on the box about this. For the record, Switch 1 updates could be downloaded peer-to-peer, and I'm assuming this carries forward for Switch 2, but I have no idea if Game Key Cards work the same way.
[0] If you live in Japan and want an international-spec Switch 2, that's an exclusive My Nintendo Store item that costs the same as it does in the US.
As someone who’s been collecting games since the early 2000s, it’s tough watching physical media slowly vanish—it changes how we archive and experience history. While digital is convenient, it doesn’t guarantee long-term access. I’ve turned to sites like https://rickyscasino.org/ lately—not for gaming, but to stay updated on tech trends and how digital systems are evolving, especially in entertainment and transaction models. You can’t play there, but there’s a lot of useful info on how things are shifting. This kind of move by Nintendo feels like a step further from ownership toward controlled access, and it raises fair concerns for preservationists. At this point, maybe the best approach is to support emulation efforts and archive communities to help keep gaming history alive and accessible.
I guess I'm the odd duck with a switch that has never been online. It sounds like the switch2 isn't for me.
Sad but I don't want another device that wants to be more than it is, I basically want an updated version of my gameboy from the 90s and that's it. No downloads, no network, no social, just a game you can quietly play anywhere when you have a bit of time, no nonsense
This thing already happens with download only games being sold. At least with the game cards you can sell the card again which you can't with the keys.
So essentially this is an improvement and you won't even know it if you only buy first party games.
Hah, I thought it was just me. Mine was the same, never online, and this key based card thing makes me think that my next, and probably final console purchase, will be a replacement Switch 1. Although I saw the prices just went up, and I didnt even know about the oled version. The main thing that holds me back is the dof blurr in Links Awakening.
I imagine that Nintendo want a slice of this subscription based gaming scam. The HD versions already feel like a step in that greed direction. And I think I saw a collection of Mario 3D games that fell into that same repackage-and-sell-again category, with crazy pricing.
You might like the DE10-nano Mister project. I manged to get some old arcade cabinates running on a big monitor, no frame drops or lag like most emulators suffer, and no stream of 10p coins required. FPGA feels closer in terms of preservation.
That's amazing! Thanks for the tip!
Why don't we just keep as much of high-resolution gameplay videos as possible. This makes reconstruction possible at least in theory. Not now, but with the time it should be possible to reconstruct similar experience even for multiplayer online games. Not the code, of course.
> “seeing Nintendo do this is a little disheartening”, adding: “You would hope that a company that big, that has such a storied history, would take preservation a little more seriously.”
I don't see why preservation (outside their own archives) would be a goal for Nintendo. The reality seems to be the opposite: They'd like the branding and memory of old games to be preserved, but please not the game itself - because then they can re-release it for every new system as a "remastered" variant.
> they can re-release it for every new system as a "remastered" variant
Nintendo's strategy seems to be working. For example, I seem to have purchased Super Mario Bros 3 multiple times, in physical and digital form, for multiple systems (Wii, 3DS, Wii U ...), and I'm also renting it as part of Nintendo Switch Online.
On the up side, I don't have any problem emulating it. Actually all of those versions are emulated, come to think of it.
It's an imperfect solution to a real problem—Nintendo wants to use cartridges instead of discs for some good reasons, some not-so-good reasons—but the costs per cartridge are too high for cartridges big enough to hold modern games.
But you can look at it as a transferable license to otherwise digital games, and that's not bad. A console with entirely (or almost entirely) digital games would have no used game market, and that sucks both for sellers (which I don't do), and buyers (which I happily do).
It would be nice if there was some legal protection for the buyer that, by selling a physical license, that Nintendo be required to make the download itself available for some time period > 20 years.
There are a couple of elephants in the room here.
Firstly is the proliferation of games and their quality. Anyone can make a new game, given an engine and a few art assets. It doesn't take a lot of capital or know-how to release a new game. Therefore, there's a glut of games on the market, from high to low quality, and there are far more than any rational human could ever purchase or play. This was a problem from Day One: When I purchased my Atari 2600 console (or rather my parents purchased for me) my sister and I quickly filled up a 50-cartridge shelf with games where we barely even played or scratched the surface. They were disposable! When we got a Commodore 64, there were more 3rd parties on the market, making games we never heard of, and these games were so deep and thick that one of them could've kept us occupied for 6 months, but still we chewed through them as fast as we could afford.
Secondly, aren't most all the games now oriented around MMOG "communities" and multi-player-based? That makes preservation practically impossible. If you've not only got to keep the game servers running, but you've also got to preserve the community that goes with them... well, forget it. Gamers grow up, their tastes change; they move on.
I enjoyed a few games, years ago, that basically turned into ghost-town servers. Many of us were so tenacious and dedicated to that specific game as it was, yet the new influx of players dried up, and nobody could prevent that from happening. Every newbie was a ban-evader. Every rich opponent was paying real $$$ just to stay competitive. Our precious game jumped the shark and we couldn't let it die. But die they must. I propose that most games are not worth preserving. Perhaps games should be enjoyed where they are, and then left to die, because they will never be the same again.
It's not fun how the trend is to force everybody to have internet, as if it was an essential service like electricity or water. Some argue it is, but I'd say we're generally far from there. I wanted a console to play when I go to my out of town apartment where we don't need nor want to contract an internet line. And now it means I cannot even bring some cartridges with me and swap them as I please, because they are always requiring internet connectivity for everything.
What hasn't failed me is to hack my devices and use pirated versions of my content. Ironic that this method works much better. All games I want, locally, in a pack of SD cards I bring in my backpack, ready to install and play 100% offline at any moment in a train, a flight, a boat.
> "You would hope that a company that big, that has such a storied history, would take preservation a little more seriously.”
Why would one hope that? Nintendo has never ever shown any kind of sign of even remote interest in anybody not-Nintendo doing any kind of preservation.
I can play all the on disk ps3 games I own, the downloadable ones are dust on the wind.
Disc rot is a thing unfortunately. And they are no longer making new PS3s.
GP didn’t say that they were playing them on disk, only that they owned them on disc. Backing up PS3 games is relatively easy these days. I fully expect PS3 emulation to be good enough long before working PS3s are unobtainium.
yet, empirically, the seven or eight disks work, and the downloadables are gone
I think Switch is just following the other consoles eventually.
This lead me think, is there any 8-bit/16-bit/32-bit native handheld (not Pi emulation) market? I guess the primary difficulty is to make games for them, so most likely just a small hobbyist market. I still think kids don't really care about graphics though, at least when they are young.
There's this, https://play.date/. Haven't heard much news about it lately though. Feel like any handheld built around a relatively cheap microcontroller should be shooting for a much lower price point.
Economy of scale only saves you so much at small batch sizes, plus I assume the unique input setup drives up the BOM price a fair bit.
I think they did a few blogposts about having initial teething troubles getting consistent manufacturing, so they might have a significant upfront expense cost to subsidize (which probably explains why they're raising the price again...)
There are a few handhelds that can play pico-8 games. I think it’s done by running pico-8 itself on the handheld which can also run other emulators so I’m not sure it meets your criteria but there’s that at least :)
Yes, the good old Game Boy(/Color/Advance) consoles still work. Hobbyists are modding them with better screens, and are still creating new games.
It's a shame. The beautiful thing about Switch game cards is that you can just pop them in and play. Compare that to PS5 where you have a lengthy installation followed by a 40GB download...
As other people have observed, some Switch games did this too, in part or whole, it just wasn't branded as a distinct feature like this, the games just said "you need to download a day 1 update", like in your example.
The article already touches on this, but in the modern day the games that exist on physical media are pretty much useless without their zero-day patches. Putting physical media aside, companies rarely make older builds available, so even when media contains a game and servers are up there is already plenty of ‘lost media’ if you consider old and interesting (potentially hilariously broken) old builds of virtually every game.
I’ve realized this at some point, but video games are ephemeral and should really be enjoyed in the now. Even if you can perfectly preserve a game, and the means to play it, tastes change so quickly in gaming that a game that’s fun today might not be enjoyable even a year later.
“Plays are ephemeral and should really be enjoyed in the now. Even if you can perfectly preserve a play, and the means to perform it, tastes change so quickly in theatre that a play that’s entertaining today might not be enjoyable even a year later.” - you, in the 1620s, probably.
Now imagine that the play cannot be altered (game build), it can only be performed on a specifically shaped stage (hardware requirements), actors can only be replaced by lookalikes (‘remaster’ tweaks), it can only be performed with a full theatre (online requirements), and the playwright retains the only copy of the play (source code).
Then you start to approach the problem that is gaming.
Which is exactly why more needs to be done by governments to stop this. A simple fix would be to say that in order to qualify for copyright protection, a national archive reserves the right to request a functional copy of the work in a form compatible with any future data migration projects.
People have been altering plays for ages without much issue (just look at the mod community), emulating and porting plays to different stages, and even reverse engineering their own copies of the script.
The only real catch has been online stuff and even that is sometimes worked around or recreated. It's not an impossible task to solve the problem of making games playable into the future, but it'll probably require legislation to force game companies to preserve their game and server code to allow for it.
These day0/day1 patches and updates usually weigh a lot less than the base games, on Switch the appeal of cartridges is to avoid filling up storage.
Before the Switch, save files were also stored on cartridges, making physical medium far more appealing than the mess digital was on the 3DS (if you owned more than 1 console).
No real offense intended, because I understand the feeling here, but this...
> I’ve realized this at some point, but video games are ephemeral and should really be enjoyed in the now. Even if you can perfectly preserve a game, and the means to play it, tastes change so quickly in gaming that a game that’s fun today might not be enjoyable even a year later.
This is horseshit.
It's a defeatist attitude, and it's not reflective of reality. Yes - some things go out of fashion for a while, but trends almost always cycle back. You might think something is out of style right now, (and that's fine) but to be facetious: One man's trash is another man's treasure.
> Yes - some things go out of fashion for a while, but trends almost always cycle back.
Exactly, this is even supported by Nintendo's own services offering emulation of their older systems. There is clearly demand for the ability to older games.
Capitulation to an "inevitable" fate of download only games is just taking the easy way out by not sticking to your own core values. I have personally pre-ordered a Switch 2, but I will not being purchasing any online only cartridges or download only software.
We haven't had the watershed moment that brings it into focus for gamers at large yet, The Crew was close. But Nintendo has kept the download servers going for all of their systems which has provided a false sense of security. Once those start being shut down maybe we'll see some actual response. Though with the introduction of Gamecube emulation on the Switch 2, they are only a small step away from emulating the Wii and giving people another scapegoat for their lazy acceptance of lack of ownership.
> should the Switch 2 shop servers ever close down in the distant future – and therefore no longer provide the downloads necessary – those cartridges may become unplayable.
> may
Weasel 'game journalists' like this is the reason gaming is dying.
The world is WILL not may. It happened before and it will happen again because publications like this are nothing more than pr department for gaming companies.
Things like this happen at least partially because of people who'd blindly pay greedy companies like Nintendo, let 'em grow and have their way with their dark patterns.
Does the GameKey Cards allows me to play the game offline??
If I give this GameKey card to the friend, will he be able to download and play it? With card inserted, of course. If not - these cards are just glorified activation codes
That's exactly what separates this from activation codes, yes.
It CAN be used to give you a WHOLE new experience without any additional hassle! But it WILL be used to lock you out of your $85 instead.
I was under the impression that the games would download and be stored on the card. Is this not the case? My current collection of game cards exceeds any expanded storage by quite a wide margin…
Edit: I guess not:
“you must have enough free space in your Nintendo Switch 2 system memory or microSD Express card”
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...
FFS. I never thought this day would come with Nintendo.
Wow this website does pop up ads on mobile devices in 2025.
Hot take: when a game is not able to be preserved, it is not worthy of preservation efforts. When it's not worthy of being saved for the future is it even worth playing today? My answer is no.
I feel similarly, but at the same time there will come a point where there won't be any games being made that aren't designed to be unplayable after a certain amount of time.
I expect that far more people will suck it up and pay whatever they have to in order to play whatever games they're allowed to today rather than abandon playing video games entirely. I think game companies are counting on that too.
If you're counting on gamers to vote will their wallets in order to save video games I think you're going to be extremely disappointed.
This way nintendo can take the games you bought for any reason or no reason at all. You'll own nothing and like it!