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.
So the story is that this is because they can’t manufacture carts smaller than 64GB, but why is that? Can’t they use whatever they’ve been using for Switch 1 carts? The dual-mode Switch 2 Edition carts are cross-compatible with Switch 1, so we know it’s definitely possible to use those carts.
I suspect, just by looking at the current market regarding microsd cards, that anything smaller than 64gb would actually be MORE expensive than the 64gb. going from 64 -> 32gb adds 2ct/gb, going down to 16 adds nearly 3ct/gb in addition, and i suspect that they would love to price the smaller cards even higher because the margin must be pretty tight by now if i compare the prices with what they were a few years back.
Also, production for smaller sizes has probably shifted down dramatically in the last years when i look at availability.
Nintendo needs to get to work making smaller cartridges for Switch 2, 64GB carts only is too expensive for a lot of publishers. I do think key cards have a purpose for 64GB+ big games that would be very expensive physically without the key card system, but smaller games should have the whole game on the cartridge. At the very least Nintendo needs to ban code in a box and make those publishers move over to key cards.
I think the opposite is the case, keycards make much more sense for small titles that are quick to download and don’t eat up lots of internal space; also, smaller cartridges will probably cost more for what you get instead of less when buying in bulk. Production capabilities for smaller sizes are on their way out for anything smaller than 64 gb except for specialized storage with super high speeds. In the microsd-card market there is a noticable bump in cost/gb when stepping down from 32gb to 16gb, so i assume that the 32gb will already cost more in bulk for new orders.
Oh no the frogs noticed turn it down a notch
I have zero time…the answer is screw nintendo
