Update thanks to thethatfox:
Physical game cards may also not actually contain the game:
Nintendo Switch 2 Game-Key Card Overview
Game-key cards are different from regular game cards, because they don’t contain the full game data. Instead, the game-key card is your “key” to downloading the full game to your system via the internet.
Update 2: There is probably a difference in Game-key cards and card that contain real game data. So we don’t know right now how often these game-key cards are used or if nintendo is using them.
Makes sense
That is a huge bummer for people that spends months working places with very slow or no internet. It is getting harder and harder to get physical media, and every single device needs to be constantly touching the internet to work properly. I just find it so ridiculous you can’t buy a brand new console, and throw a CD / cartridge in it, and expect it to actually play a video game.
Oh that’s super interesting. This opens up a lot of long term attack vectors for piracy/homebrew/emulation.
Physical game cards may also not actually contain the game:
Nintendo Switch 2 Game-Key Card Overview
Game-key cards are different from regular game cards, because they don’t contain the full game data. Instead, the game-key card is your “key” to downloading the full game to your system via the internet.
So you pay a premium and maybe don’t even get a “real” cartridge.
This is the craziest thing for me. Now buying physical means you cant install or play if Nintendos servers are offline. As it stands, buying a BluRay PS5 game means you can play it without any connection for most games - actual ownership of a game that cant be taken away unless they send people to your home and take it away.
Not even that, currently games for say, ps5 download some from the disk, some from online.
This Key-card fuckery means they can now lock the online downloaded portion of that game and now this can be used to prevent the second owner from downloading it with the same code
Publishers have boogiemanned Used Games for fucking decades and now they’re taking another swipe to kill them.
Seems like something the EU should be pushing back against.
Wow That’s bad. I add that to the post thx.
That’s total bullshit. Fuck Nintendo.
I hope this is only for certain games and they specify it on the box (like those scammy boxes they sell you like physical games, but that say “digital download code included” and there’s no cart), because otherwise it’s a complete scam. Imagine you’re on a trip and buy a Nintendo Switch 2 game in a shop and can’t play it because your Switch 2 isn’t connected to the Internet. Or they close the shop and your memory dies and you can’t download that game you bought for USD 70. This is really bad…
It’s probably not for every game, we don’t know that exactly right now. See this screenshot.
I upvoted this. Not because i like it but for more visibility.
I think game key cards are for games that don’t fit on a regular game card. So like what happened before with some Switch games, but more transparent about which ones don’t have the full game on them.
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… and also both are a lot more expensive than they were before
* not counting inflation.
I’m not saying it doesn’t suck but SNES games were over $100 adjusted. It’s kind of crazy game prices have been inflation proof for ~2 decades.
Inflation was for a long time offset by a steep decline in the cost of delivering the product, and thats still true for the digital copies to a large extent, but with most AAA games blowing huge budgets on production publishers have been wanting to push the ceiling up for years now.
How does inflation matter though? The price of current games would have also reflected increases in inflation if that was the case.
you have to consider the cost in terms of real wages though, inflation only makes production costs higher for producers, for customers money is worth about as much as it has been since the 70’s; though this changes from income quantile to income quantile, and from market to market.
the price increases only reflects confidence Nintendo has in their DRM.
Huh? Money is worth a lot less than it did in the 70s by any real metric. And wages are way higher too.
They’ve been inflation proof because consumers lose their shit so hard with every price increase. The price of games is just much more visible and much more conceptually ingrained than with most other products, so every increase hits consumer awareness that much harder.
Prices instead increased in other more indirect ways. Micro-transactions in their many forms are the most obvious case. The price of your “full game” may not have gone up, but then there’s a nearly limitless trickle of smaller supplementary purchases adding to the cost.
Except back then there were a lot fewer customers, cartridges cost a lot more to manufacture, and there wasn’t countless DLC to make even more money. Also, now there are so many games that the raw supply is practically infinite.
We didn’t buy most games when I was a kid, we rented them. There were countless games we paid $5 to rent for a week and that was plenty of time to finish the whole game and return it.
I only had one rich friend who had like a hundred games he owned. He let me borrow some of them but most of them I had already rented and finished myself. There were only a few games I ended up owning myself, such as Tecmo Super Bowl and the Legend of Zelda.
Some games could also be bought used for a lot less than full price (at stores such as The Games Exchange). They also bought games back from you when you were done with them!
If I could time travel to live back then as an adult I would rent everything and only buy a game if I foresaw wanting to play it long after a week was up.
We didn’t buy most games when I was a kid, we rented them.
Many people still rent games, for even cheaper then they did back then. Xbox Gane Pass and similar services are popular for a reason.
Most of the games I buy today are less than $10 anyway. What I want from games has really changed, and a lot of the time I’m just playing free Roguelikes rather than commercial games.
With production costs that can not be decreasing
It’s the cost of the CEOs and shareholders that are driving prices up.
I’ve been waiting for prices to go up on video games for about 7 years and am surprised they haven’t gone up more, this is pretty fair imo.
They’ve been ~$60 since 2002?
They’ve been ~$60 since the early 1990s. At least.
No duh, digital games should be cheaper.
They aren’t paying to manufacture the disk/card and don’t have pay to ship it to stores.
What that doesn’t mean is that digital games be used to artificially inflate the price of physical games.
Which is what Nintendo is doing.
It needs to be a lot more cheaper, since you don’t actually own the game.
Yeah this isn’t “digital games cheaper” but more “physical games more expensive”.
That actually makes sense but I am still buying physical.
It makes sense, but it’s sad that nintendo is the first one with the biggest audience of physical games. I’m still buying physical as well.
Physical media should be the default.
Especially in the past few years where companies have proven that if you don’t own physical media, you don’t own the media, and they can take it away for any reason at any time.
Agreed. It would have been better if they had just lowered the cost of digital rather than raising the cost of physical
Won’t somebody think of the investors
Xbox actually tried this first and got so much backlash they canceled that and went back to traditional media.
Xbox will always be compared to playstation. And playstation took the opportunity to show the benefits of real physical media. Some features from xbox sound good, but it was for sure at the wrong time to do that. Also Xbox show to much how good it is to watch tv on a xbox. Marketing failed so much from microsoft at that time.
Thankfully I have so many games on my Switch that I am yet to finish or even start that I have absolutely zero desire to buy a Switch 2 and deal with this problem. Never been so grateful for my pile of shame lol
That’s what I said about PlayStation 1, and yet here we are…
I get why, but I don’t have to like it.
It’s not widely talked about, partially because Nintendo doesn’t like it talked about, but the Switch cart format makes very little sense in a lot of the same ways some of the PSP and Vita storage didn’t make sense. They are very expensive for the specs and quite small. I can only imagine this version of the carts is even more expensive, since they openly say they’re targeting faster speeds and standard SD cards are out of spec.
But let me be clear, that is nuts. They are effectively selling you a M2 SSD with each physical game purchase. It’s terrible value compared with a BluRay, for everyone involved.
It’s still a weird step that both breaks with tradition and moves things towards digital distribution forcibly, much in the way that shipping optical drives as an optional add-on did for the PS5. Having a massive collection of physical Switch games I can’t be on board, and it’s not the only additional expense they’re adding (paid back compat upgrades, Nintendo? WTF?).
but the shouty man on TV told me tariffs were good!
All of these numbers are pre-tariff, too.
If you hear any faint screaming in the background, it’s probably my bank account.
It might be £75 of buying direct from Nintendo, but it will be less from other sellers. But £75 is a really high starting point. Hopefully prices still go below £50.
There is zero chance that Nintendo is giving you a worse deal than third party sellers. That’s just not a thing. Not only does the third party retailer need to keep a cut, but there is an extra step of logistics and shipping involved. This is the MSRP. You won’t see lower unless it’s leftover stock on sale.
Admittedly, you should see a lot more of that with physical games, but who knows how small physical runs become in this weather. Physical carts could become Limited Run-style collector’s items.
I’m not sure if we’re agreeing or not. I was only talking about physical, and Amazon, Argos, etc. always sell for cheaper than Nintendo’s webstore. I sure hope physical games aren’t being phased out, but maybe this price difference between digital and physical is just reflecting that digital distribution is cheaper for Nintendo than producing physical carts.
Sure, after the fact when they were trying to offload stock. It’s certainly been easier to find cheap physical copies after launch, since digital games go in and out of sale at the same time everywhere.
We’ll see how that goes this time. I do think it’ll depend a lot on whether people keep buying carts and on how many carts they print on each run. The fact that there is a price difference makes me think they won’t be as physical-heavy as last time, but there’s no way to know yet.
Amazon routinely gives like $5-10 discounts on preorders.
Ah, okay. I only got a switch in 2020 or 2021, so I rarely bought newly released games.
This is the way to do it. I run 1-2 years behind on most single player games. I save tons of money and they’re typically done with patches at that point.
yes that could be right, I hope that other sellers lower the price. For me it’s 90€, that higher than any playstation game i know. Usually nintendo was always lower with AAA games but not anymore it seems.
