Switch 2 Game-key cards are a 'step back' for game preservation, Nightdive says

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Nintendo's new Game-key Cards offer a cost-effective way for partners to publishers to ship physical products that contain digital games, but it's not the best for games preservation.

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Nintendo has found a novel way to help contain the rising costs of physical distribution: Delivering a digital game in a physical cartridge. The Switch 2's new Game-key cards don't have the full game on them and instead require gamers to download the game digitally--it's exactly what it sounds like, a game key card.

While this update is great for business (Switch and Switch 2 cartridges are not exactly cheap to produce), it poses a potential threat for games preservation. Digital games are transient and can often be delisted and updated over time. The original experience gets lost to time unless there's a hard copy of the code somewhere--unless someone has backed it up, that launch experience could just vanish.

That's why the CEO of Nightdive Studios thinks Game-key cards are a hurdle for games preservation. Nightdive is known for their re-releases of classic games and are basically one of the key active stewards of games preservation at this point.

"I think that the Nintendo example is a step back," Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick said in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz.

"Seeing Nintendo do this is a little disheartening. You would hope that a company that big, that has such a storied history, would take preservation a little more seriously."

Nintendo for its part has mostly re-released products in cycles across multiple generations, and with the original Switch, the company nixed the Virtual Console and instead relegated its previous-generation games to a subscription service.

So it's not that Nintendo doesn't necessarily care about games preservation, it's that the company has more of a staggered rollout of content and services that are targeted at long-term revenue potential, e.g. through multiple years of subscription service updates.