its worse than comparing it to physical media that has all content on media, but better than display boxes that only has a digital code in it.
digital key carts are more replacing the latter (which is better) but there will definitely be a few devs who will opt out of physical media storage costs for the key card
The 3DS and Wii U eShop was available for more than a decade, a full 6 years after the Switch was released. So all in all I’d say it was available pretty long, especially considering that there was no authorization required to download a game, so they were paying for servers to give away games for free
its worse than comparing it to physical media that has all content on media, but better than display boxes that only has a digital code in it.
digital key carts are more replacing the latter (which is better) but there will definitely be a few devs who will opt out of physical media storage costs for the key card
how is it better than display boxes?
Transferable licence.
They can be sold, gifted, inherited, etc.
That inheritance is going to be on a pretty short timespan, since 3DS and Wii U online services and downloads are already gone.
The 3DS and Wii U eShop was available for more than a decade, a full 6 years after the Switch was released. So all in all I’d say it was available pretty long, especially considering that there was no authorization required to download a game, so they were paying for servers to give away games for free
I think an inheritance should probably last longer than a decade. This is still an arbitrary expiration date that’s bad for the customer.