“Historically, we’ve been very agnostic, right? We go off what the consumer prefers, and take that into account very heavily. 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.”
Yet. They’ll let Sony take the heat for going first, but we know this is what all three console manufacturers want sooner or later.
It’s obvious that Game Key Cards are a step towards a gradual phase-out. Cartridges are a lot more expensive to manufacture than disks, and probably getting worse due to datacenters driving up the price of flash memory. It’s not a question of if they’ll ditch cartridges, but when.
I expect we’ll continue to see carts for the remainder of the Switch 2’s lifespan, but we may see a point at which they only do GKCs for late gen titles. And then after that, the Switch 3 will be all digital.
I can see them doing a Switch 2 lite eventually that only does digital games.
How much do you want to bet Winds and Waves are gonna be on a key card? Pokopia was one of the biggest selling Switch 2 games, though I feel like that was more a Koei Tecmo decision than TPCI.
This!!! I hate it. Pokopia is only 7GB in size, so GameKey card seems feasible. But this is GF/PokeCompany. Like they got no money to spare for a full release game card.
…IT’S ONLY 7 GB?!
They TOTALLY could’ve fit it on a cartridge then! Even with all the DLC!
Supposedly S2 carts only come in 64GB, no smaller, and that’s allegedly the reason why smaller games don’t want to eat the full manufacturing cost of that compared to a much cheaper GKC.
Based on publisher leaks, there may be smaller carts now. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/cheaper-lower-capacity-switch-2-cartridges-could-mean-fewer-game-key-cards/
Poor pokemon company going bankrupt because of game card releases lol Imagine XD