Nightdive Studios, The Strong Museum, and the Videogame Heritage Society discuss how to preserve games in the digital age
If your digital game was installed, it worked perfectly during the outage.
But yes, if you wanted to play any other game from your library, that wasn’t installed, digital won’t work, but physical would have worked.
I can see both side of the arguments.
Many games are releasing with just a code in a physical box, which among other issues means people can’t resell those, with Game-key cards, at least people can resell these, and the next person can download the game too.
On the other hand, it is kind of officially sanctioning this practice of not releasing a full game on a cartridge, which can lead more companies to follow this example.
I guess it’s upto end users now, to vote with their wallet and let the companies know that they won’t buy these.
What are the other options that still release full games on a disc/cartridge? Sony and Microsoft already went “Download Discs” a long while ago. The Nintendo and the Switch 1 was the last hold out, and even some of its bigger games were eshop only. I keep having to look to third parties, like limitedrungames.com, to get physical editions, or having to import from a country where it did get a physical release.
There are still some games companies that release full games on disc, like Cyberpunk 2077 releasing full game on cartridge for Switch 2. There are other examples too, but they are getting less and less.
Oh that’s the funny part. Cyberpunk and the DLC, on a cartridge. Bravely Default, a DS game, download cart. It’s silly.
limitedrun.com is some other random website.
I fixed that. Thank you.
“Game-Key Cards” so it’s a licensing dongle with a fancy name and peculiar shape.
I do wonder what console manufacturers will do in order to keep at least some all-physical releases around as game sizes grow. Blu Ray has topped out at 128GB on the highest end discs, and flash storage isn’t dropping in price as quick as before for making larger cartridges. Maybe we will see more cases like Mario Kart World where the physical version is more expensive? However, I do think there might be less key card games as Switch 2 goes on, as likely a big motivation for key cards at launch is the current low production volume and high price of SD Express cards (which the cartridges are based on). Shelf space and shipping are a considerable cost to publishers, so they would have some motivation to avoid any costs related to the eShop hosting if possible.
Well, what little interest I had in buying as Switch 2 is now totally gone.
