The Nintendo Switch 2 has a more muddled relationship with physical media than prior Nintendo consoles due to the controversial addition of Game Key Cards, but the platform is now the best place for gamers to have some semblance of ownership over their games.
As PlayStation abandons physical media in a series of stupid decisions that will likely kneecap the gaming brand eventually, Nintendo has promised fans that it has no intentions of leaving physical media behind.
In a recent interview, vice president and general manager of Nintendo Latin America Bill van Zyll explained that Nintendo is committed to physical media, even if that means many third-party games are only available as Game Key Cards.
“Historically, we’ve been very agnostic, right?” van Zyll said. “We go off of what the consumer prefers, and take that into account very heavily. We also have a platform that just launched. We’re barely just over a year into NS2. And it’s got both digital, but it also has physical, that capability.”
In the interview, van Zyll confirmed that Nintendo has “no plans to ditch physical” as they “know how much the fans like it”. The reality for PlayStation is that fans love physical media there as well. While there is a larger percentage of players that buy digital content on PS5, physical media is still extremely prevalent with 35% of Marvel’s Wolverine sales coming from physical buyers.
Sony and PlayStation is acutely aware of how popular physical sales are, and how much players want them. To this day, months after the announcement that physical disc sales will end in 2028, fans are still pushing for Sony to keep discs under every social media post the company puts out, and the company hasn’t even given a statement on the ongoing backlash.
In contrast, Nintendo is simply doing what all companies should be doing: providing options for fans. Compared to the cost of physical disc manufacturing, Nintendo’s production cost for game cartridges are immense, yet first-party games are not even just releasing physically, but are releasing entirely on cartridge games as well while third parties enjoy the lower cost of Game Key Cards.
There’s a quote from PTG CEO Clive Price that comes to mind amongst all of this: “Consider the customer who complains and criticises you for the bad service you deliver. You ought to be grateful that he is giving you the opportunity to correct yourself and make amends in some tangible way.” Despite months of backlash, Sony simply doesn’t care, Sony isn’t trying to fix it. On the other hand, Nintendo is continuing as normal despite massively increased costs.
I have to be honest, I’m not even that much of a Nintendo fan. I adore Nintendo games, but have often found myself gravitating more to other platforms with a large degree of respect towards Nintendo’s inventiveness and ability to correct its mistakes. (Although, I am still waiting for themes to be added to the Nintendo Switch.) Hell, it took them a generation to fix the Nintendo Switch eShop, but they did it!
There’s a sense that Nintendo is still the late 1800s toy company it started as, simply looking for a way to entertain fans across the world. While many of us are older than the demographic that would be excited by plastic building blocks of playing cards, Nintendo does still treat us like children, but in a good way. They want us to be excited by the opening of a new physical game, they want us to be attached to their characters, they want to chuck in a gimmick (mouse mode) to cheer us up, they want us to see joy at the word Nintendo.
Despite the massive cost in memory, Nintendo is still committed to fan desire to own their games physically. That is the simplest commitment a company can make right now, especially if their physical games only exist on cheaply produced discs. If a company cannot commit to such basic desires from fans, it’s simply not committed to those fans, and there’s no future where those fans are respected.
