Nintendo Exec Officially Comments on Future Physical Game Support

It seems Nintendo won’t replicate Sony’s controversial pivot to an all-digital future anytime soon. In an interview with YouTuber Coelho no Japão, Bill van Zyll, VP and general manager for Nintendo in Latin America, confirmed that the company will continue supporting physical media for the foreseeable future.

“We go off what the consumer prefers, and take that into account very heavily,” van Zyll said. “We also have a platform that was just launched. We’re barely just over a year into NS2. It’s got both digital and physical – that capability. There’s no plans to ditch physical. We know how much the fans like it as well, so our position has been to be agnostic.” By being “agnostic,” van Zyll means the Nintendo Switch 2 supports digital purchases via the Nintendo eShop as well as physical game cartridges.

How do Nintendo Switch 2 game cartridges work?

Admittedly, there’s a major caveat: most Nintendo Switch 2 game cartridges don't work like traditional physical games. Instead of games being stored on this physical media, most of these cartridges act as a “key” that authenticates the purchase and allows the user to download the game to their system from the Nintendo Switch store. Beyond taking up extra space on the Switch 2’s internal storage compared to if the game was saved on a cartridge, this game-key card system appears to run into the same problems as digital game ownership elsewhere. If Nintendo were to shut down the store and servers that host the game, would players still be able to download it?

Beyond nostalgia and collector interest, one of the main points of contention around the pivot to digital is that players don’t technically “own” these games; they are simply purchasing a license to play them. While the specifics around game key cards are slightly different, the effect is the same: if the game ever becomes unavailable to download, you won’t be able to play it as you could with a traditional physical cartridge.

While many developers, like Final Fantasy Remake director Naoki Hamaguchi, favor the pivot to key cards, as it means they don’t have to worry about cramming their games onto a 64 GB cartridge, players are understandably upset that their cartridges may be rendered useless hunks of plastic once the servers to download that game go down.