I wouldn’t say games. I’d say carefully calculated reward dopamine triggers with tendrils snaking directly to the entirety of my liquid assets disguised as games.
Blizzard as it was has been dead for a while now. Jeff Kaplan leaving suddenly was irrefutable proof that OW2 was going to be flaming dogshit and it was and still is.
Nexon making SC? Nice, the new SC will be free, but each unit have 10 level of upgrade and you only have basic unit available, the rest is unlockable as you earn your space buck. Fully upgraded unit have the same stats as the one from SC2. There will be 50 maps to play, but you only can access to 3 each week, and they put map in rotation. Each unit have 20 skins available. New race: the space elf with mushroom people.
I thought Game Key Cards, while not something I would ever buy, weren't the end of the world if they were just meant to replace the existing practice of code-in-a-box for games that won't fit on a cart. It's actually less bad than that, so I didn't get out my pitchfork just yet.
But the sheer number of games being released in this format is alarming. Code-in-a-box was rare, this is looking like it's outnumbering proper physical games. And many of these games don't even make sense to be key cards, they can fit just fine on a cart. There are ports of Switch 1 games that already fit on Switch 1 carts in here!
Switch carts are proprietary and expensive. Rumor has it that 64 GB is the smallest cart you can buy for the switch 2. And corporations will do anything to save a buck.
I’m hoping that at least Nintendo will release their full games on the card. The truth is I’m probably not buying many third party games on Switch that aren’t exclusives.
Afaik, they are. It’s just that third party developers would need to optimize their file sizes heavily for the great pay off of reducing their profit margin. They already didn’t want to do that for the Switch and Nintendo now enables them to not do it to incentivize more ports.
At least in Japan, I think, every 1st party game comes on the cartridge, pretty much every third party game except for Cyberpunk comes as a code.
Not inevitable if people fought back… but people keep telling companies this shit is ok by paying them to screw everyone over. Companies used to have to replace your bugged cartridge with a patched one or risk backlash and profit losses.
Nintendo also sells all their games digital and you can’t transfer those.
Yet.
They’ve advertised Virtual Game Cards as a value-added feature to let your friends borrow games, but I’d bet good money they built out that infrastructure to comply with the potential for the EU to require used sales on digital.
There are Virtual Game Cards, purchased and downloaded digitally from the eShop. These can now be traded, sold, gifted, loaned, etc. to other friends, which was not previously possible. (This could possibly require an NSO subscription, but I’m not clear if that’s true at all.)
There are physical game cartridges, which contain the actual game on them, and (from what I’ve heard) most games will be distributed this way.
Then, there are also physical carts that contain only the virtual game license file, thus that you have to possess the physical cart in order to download or play the game. Apparently, there are Switch 1 games like this already, but they are rare.
With the introduction of Virtual Game Cards, it is no longer possible (even on Switch 1) to play more than one copy of a game online at the same time, even with a min NSO Family subscription.
People also lost their shit over the PSP Go being digital distro only in a physical handheld console, and lost their shit so hard that Sony of all people walked it back with the Vita and built cartridges back into the spec. (And it became retroactively excusable once it was discovered how easily the PSP/Go could be hacked, and suddenly the Go was the desirable model for emulation and, er, backups. But that’s neither here nor there. Under its intended use, within its original lifespan, it was a stupid idea.)
If you ask me the entire point of a game console is to be a dedicated platform that you stick games in and it always works. If I wanted to fuck around with downloadable only content, games that are only keycodes, patches, day 1 DLC, always-online DRM, and the inevitable day the servers all go dark I’d just game on PC. Which, come to think of it, in these modern times is exactly what I do anyway. I have game systems dating all the way back to the Atari VCS which I can to this very day if I feel like it slap a cartridge or disk in and they play. To me, there is immense value in that. Without that, there’s really no need for the “real hardware experience” for me. I can just emulate if any title comes out that I truly give enough of a shit about that I must play it. Anything else is just selling you a rental, but at full price. I find that immensely distasteful.
So I have zero interest in the Switch 2, and thus it will be the first Nintendo console in history I don’t own, or aim to own (I do not have a Virtual Boy, much to my shame and embarrassment.) I imagine I’m not the only one. Nintendo’s been trying very hard to lose the plot, which for a company as profitable and famous as they are takes a real concerted effort. Congratulations to them, then, if that’s the goal – What we are witnessing here is very possibly the beginning of the end for big N.
Not to defend Nintendo much here, but the situation with game-key-cards is at least better than that. You can freely trade, give away, resell them like any physical cart.
It’s a step up from digital in terms of freedom, but a step down in convenience (cart has to be in the system).
Compared to real, physical, data-on-the-cart media though, these are a definite downgrade.
I’m willing to bet that 95% of their customers do not have an issue with this. Probably the majority don’t even realize that someone could have an issue with this. People are already very used to having to do big downloads with games and a lot of switch 1 games were already requiring half of the game to be downloaded due to large cart costs. Also tbh I don’t think it’s really a preservation issue as long as piracy exists.
I’m willing to bet that the majority of people don’t really care about this. If they did, you’d see GoG do wildly better than Steam does. People like DRM and the convenience with having your library digitally available with the ease of installation, they just don’t like badly implemented DRM.
Hardly inevitable. I'm broke af, the economy is collapsing, so not spending money on Nintendo is the easiest possible choice.
Literally not buying something you don't need is the easiest form of protest.
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