As long as Nintendo themselves never use them, I don’t entirely hate the idea since I believe it only exists to make third party publishers happy. Game cards are obviously much more expensive than discs to produce and it turns out that publishers don’t like significant physical media production costs eating into their profits. This is a lesson Nintendo learned the hard way from the N64 that they don’t want to repeat. Because of the nature of the Switch platform, there isn’t really a good solution. They couldn’t use cheap discs without going with some weird mini disc format and then that would cause bigger issues with access speed, battery life, durability, etc. The alternative is having the consumer download the game directly and these game card things are a way for publishers to also still have some sort of retail presence.
Personally I would never buy one of these code cards. I’d rather just have the game linked to my account which I’m honestly quite comfortable with 20 years into having a Steam account and this being the norm on all kinds of devices these days.
As long as Nintendo themselves never use them, I don’t entirely hate the idea since I believe it only exists to make third party publishers happy. Game cards are obviously much more expensive than discs to produce and it turns out that publishers don’t like significant physical media production costs eating into their profits. This is a lesson Nintendo learned the hard way from the N64 that they don’t want to repeat. Because of the nature of the Switch platform, there isn’t really a good solution. They couldn’t use cheap discs without going with some weird mini disc format and then that would cause bigger issues with access speed, battery life, durability, etc. The alternative is having the consumer download the game directly and these game card things are a way for publishers to also still have some sort of retail presence.
Personally I would never buy one of these code cards. I’d rather just have the game linked to my account which I’m honestly quite comfortable with 20 years into having a Steam account and this being the norm on all kinds of devices these days.