Nintendo Switch 2's "Game-key Cards" and what that means for the Steam Deck

Gaming
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One of the biggest points I see people make in favour of nintendo is that "you own the cartridges of the games you buy and they can't be taken away from you, unlike the license you are getting when you buy from steam" and there is truth in that statement; if nintendo's and steam's servers went offline forever, generally speaking, you won't be able to play your steam games but you will be able to insert the cartridge into the switch (2) and play with no questions asked. Sure, with GOG, you can do the same and even easily backup to multiple drives, so the chances of losing a GOG game to drive failures are much lower than losing a nintendo game to cartridge failure, but for the sake of keeping things simple (and because some games only release on steam), I'll make this comparison strictly with steam

Nintendo also has its own digital storefront, and while you don't need an internet connection to launch a digital game after launching it a first time, you do need an internet connection and nintendo's servers being available to play the game again in the case of your console breaking in any way (be it physical damage, drive failure, etc.). Assuming nintendo will keep their digital storefront open forever is not a good assumption. Sure, you can re-download your purchased digital Wii games even if the ability to buy was removed in early 2019, but there was a time period of a few months when the servers went "down for maintenance"... and that maintenance took more than half a year. With that in mind, I wouldn't expect Nintendo to take seriously anything old that doesn't actively make them money today

Now, I'm not saying a similar situation can't happen to steam, but that's the thing; when it comes to digital games, both are at a similar dark situation when it comes to ownership of what you buy.

And so the answer to many people who buy nintendo games would be to just go with cartridges, sure. I mean, playstation and xbox may be pushing for digital, but it's nintendo and their family-friendly-focused consoles what we are talking about, surely, they won't expect parents to insert the money inside the device that their kid actively uses and in some cases there might not even be a stable internet connection, so surely, they would never drop physical media, right?

...right?

https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/68415

oh.

This doesn't mean that much at short-term as long as you have a stable internet connection, but it does bring the ownership problems of digital to some "physical" games. And with this start, I wouldn't be surprised if the switch 3 or, at most, the switch 4 dropped physical media entirely

So at that point, the major comparison points between nintendo (and playstation and xbox) with steam are not even ownership of what you buy, since they will all become equally as bad in not a very far future, but the amount of games you will be able to play.

I'm not sure about PS and xbox, but at least nintendo, if you want to play anything older than switch games on modern hardware, you have to pay a subscription, which gets progressively more expensive depending on what old console you are trying to play games of. On steam, I can buy and play Half-Life today, a game from the late 90s, and not because of re-releases, but because the original game was never removed from the store once it was uploaded (not saying games never get removed, but it can happen on steam just like on any digital storefront of any console)

And at that point... well, the switch can only play recent digital games and some old games with a subscription. the steam deck can play new and old games, and optionally there are subscriptions (but the games aren't locked to it), and to that you got an entire desktop mode. So I can see a future where SteamOS in general (not just the steam deck) is at least nearly as widely adopted as Nintendo consoles, since they offer everything many nintendo fans would expect from a console: easy-to-navigate interface for a controller, plug-and-play experience for games, and nice extra features. That would mean bigger linux adoption and game developers giving it much more importance than now. And keeping in mind that even as of now, so there are no "some games" that don't run or don't support anti-cheat

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Honestly to me the "Game-key Cards" are just a weird thing to have. It's basically a digital copy of the game, but not because you still need the physical card to act as a "key". It's almost the worst of both worlds. Require internet to start / download and install (yes subsequent runs are offline, but if you need to redownload for whatever reason, that's still there) and the card. At least in the past, if you had a physical version of a PC game, they would require the disk as the key, but there was no internet connection, it was just checking for that key (which was annoying in its own right, but still, you could get around it too).

I don't hate the idea Nintendo will be doing by allowing you to "give" a game to someone else for a couple weeks (or whenever you choose to take it back before that) but I would wager that isn't strictly device to device, presumably device->internet -> device. At least with a 3ds game (from recollection) a game share was between just the devices themselves (download play, I think it was called). Wasn't full games, but versions of the games to play with friends. With the size the games will be on the switch 2, I doubt they want to do that between devices. Would probably be too slow for the downloads.

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From my understanding, device to device is only needed for when lending to that other console for the first time. After that, it will be possible to just do it through the internet

Yes, but that's another different feature they are adding.

Apparently, Switch 1 will be able to benefit from the receiving side, but not on the sending side, and only locally, while Switch 2-to-2 will support doing it online. I do have questions about game sizes and download times here, so my theory is that it will just cast the screen of the main console to the ones that "receive" the game, similar to cloud gaming, except the cloud is just your friend's switch 2

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Ah ok I was unaware of this portion. I had only seen portions of the announcement, haven't had time to look through it all. I do like the gameshare options, I used to use it when I had a 3ds, so I generally like that.

I know they also hiked the physical copy of their games, or at least a couple that they've shown? That hurts, especially since Nintendo is known for not ever reducing the cost of their games over years.

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For games non-nintendo titles, I have fully moved to linux by now. But I do like mario games, so I was considering the possibility of maybe getting an eventual "switch 2 lite" and play there. But I really don't see myself paying 90€ for a single game, and moving to digital isn't an option for me with how that's handled on consoles (and even if I did, 80€ is still too much)...

I see a lot of people complaining online about the prices (rightfully and understandably so), so i hope what happens is the same as what did in the early years of the 3DS: sales were much lower than anticipated, so a big price reduction was done. Even the wii u got some pretty appealing deals as a desperate attempt to not let the console sell as little as it did. But at the same time, I also see many people saying they will buy anyway, and also many people justifying the price saying things like "n64 games costed more than 100€"... I'm uncertain about what will happen, but if it stays the way it has been announced as, this will be the first nintendo console I will skip since I got my DS back then. I'm glad linux is making very good progress when it comes to games support, since PS and xbox aren't really that much better when it comes to not punching their customers in the face

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I've always disliked that argument. While it's not wrong, the economies of scale were so vastly different back then that you couldn't even compare then to now. Consoles were so expensive and niche, that most people never had one (unless your family had money to begin with). Which meant you needed to make the money back somehow while selling (comparatively) few copies of a game.

Once the gaming scene started to go full mainstream and the console sales went ludicrous, they realized that they didn't need to up the price of games, because there were more people buying copies of those games than ever before. But of course, as is tradition, now the "AAA" and 1st-party games have become so ridiculously bloated (GTA 6 being 2 BILLION, for a start) has made them realize they need to if they wish to continue making a ton of money for themselves. And it will continue.

The best games now are indies and "AA" games (though rare). They're smaller, less bloated companies / people, and are willing to take risks and try different gameplay mechanics that the big boys just are NOT going to do anymore, which is why a lot of people say that gaming is the worst its ever been. I don't subscribe to that, it's just that the best games nowadays aren't your usual suspects, and you need to go find the good ones, compared to just assuming the next (insert series here) game will be good.

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GPUs becoming incredibly capable of very realistic graphics have contributed a lot to the huge increase in development cost. I don't know, I think it's cool that a game looks fancy, but at the same time, I don't see the appeal of going that deep into the details?

From all the non-nintendo AAA games announced in the presentation, the visuals looked quite... wrong. Yes, they are much more detailed than they have ever been on the switch. But I don't want games to get realistic to the point the usual thing becomes something like this:

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I want games that I can have fun with, and they don't need to be excessively realistic to be fun. Sure, I'm not saying to go back to n64 graphics, but a balance between gamecube-wii u graphics is more than enough to make a really good game, maybe reserving the stronger capabilities of the system for larger 3D areas or other mechanics that wouldn't be possible/easy on lower-end hardware. Funny enough, aside of nintendo's own games, the game announced at the presentation that made the largest amount of noise because of how many people were excited about it was deltarune, and that game has SNES-like sprite graphics. You don't need a 1 billion budget developer studio that animates every single individual hair of a character to make the best game of the year.

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This killed me...

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I hate everything about that image lol.

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Yep, I too think that games are getting too far into the weeds these days. Dev's are pushing so hard to make games realistic, that the performance is no longer there. Most peoples computers today, struggle to run new games on medium settings.

You spoke on GPU's too, Nvidia's latest 5090, doesn't even hold up, its not worth the purchase! Usually, when the next GPU comes out, its at least a 20% uplift from previous generation. But 5000 series generation leaves much to be desired, not worth dropping money on.

I completely agree as well, we've seen a shift over the years, where Indy and AA titles are doing far better. Most AAA games today are garbage. Since most people are playing smaller dev games these days, you don't need anything more performance then a 3080-3090.

I even thought the 4000 series cards were starting to show performance regressions in benchmarks, but they were still faster then 3000 series, but hard to get in the pandemic. Now the 5000 series is nearly impossible to get due to stock shortage, (created by Nvidia) and the cards arn't even worth the money.

As far as Nintendo goes, they have always been in it for the money, they were never cheap. (I'm old, trust me, I know) The last Nintendo consoles I owned and played, were NES, SNES, N64. All expensive, little game improvements to each console generation.

I switched to PS2 after that, still had my PS1 as well. I have a distant family member who played the later Nintendo consoles in his generation. Game Cube, 3DS, Wii, now Switch. All the consoles have one thing in common, none of them attracted me.

Its my opinion that Nintendo has ruined Super Mario Brothers with all the silly spin offs, most notably their kart games starting with Game Cube on. Kids love them, cause its all they know, and never played the older stuff.

I got into Xbox in the 2000's with the 360. Then Microsoft decided to start ruining its consoles after their next console too, and thats when I completely got out of the console market for good, and became only a PC gamer.

Were living in new times folks, where you don't own a physical copy of the game. Truth is, it made life more convenient to just buy the game online and it gets downloaded and installed. No having to get in your car or take a bus, to peruse a game shop that might not even have your game in stock.

Plus, you also avoid the crazies who come flying in the doors flank speed, knocking people over, to get the latest game. People go nuts when anything popular and new comes out. In my moms time, it was the cabbage patch dolls, people were going nuts even back then!

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In a way, that's not exactly new

Physical copies don't last forever, the cartridges will start failing sooner or later and the discs will get scratched with use eventually. That's not even keeping in mind the consoles themselves

Yes, nintendo can't come to your home and take your copy of super mario world away from you and it will work with no questions asked for as long as it works. But what if you want to make sure you will be able to play the game you bought in many years from now without any concern about the copy of the game nor the platform it was designed for no longer functioning properly? The best long-term solution would be allowing you to run the game on modern hardware and let you make backups of your game, but that's something no console manufacturer has ever allowed anyone to do. Sure, homebrew communities have managed to create workarounds to be able to emulate your own copy of a console game without resorting to piracy, but console companies will never support that, and sometimes even attack it directly (nintendo trying to take down a wii emulator far into the switch's life even if the emulator never directly promoted piracy, for example)

So you bought Super Mario World back when it came out on the SNES. You still have the console and the game, but the console is starting to show its age by sometimes not reading cartridges or sudden controller disconnects. You know the game will become unplayable sooner or later on the original hardware but you want to play the game again. What are your options? Pay a subscription on the new console. But what if you already own the game and paid full price for it back then? Doesn't matter, subscription it is. And that's assuming it's one of nintendo's best-sellers that nintendo would rush to make available everywhere; if it's a very rare game that doesn't have as many fans, you are most likely out of luck

And unrelated to this but funny thing I found a few hours ago: Nintendo saw people were buying the steam deck even though there are games that are marked as unsupported because it doesn't run well on linux yet and took that as an excuse to not make backwards compatibility of switch 1 games on switch 2 fully compatible, unlike on all their previous consoles that had this feature

Before they gave the details, I thought it would be just for games that take advantage of the hardware itself (which would make sense, given that the switch 2 is bigger and the shape of some parts is different, not to add the removal of the IR sensor), but turns out some games that have no reason to be unsupported are, in fact, currently unsupported. Online games like rocket league and fortnite have the excuse of anti-cheat detecting a change on the system, but even offline 2D games like pizza tower? The steam deck (and linux in general) have the valid excuse of needing a 3rd-party tool that tries to make games from a completely different and closed source OS work and the fact that it works so well is impressive to say the least. Nintendo having full access and ownership to the source code of the switch 1? No excuse is valid here

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