Japan’s national library says it won’t be preserving Switch 2 Game-Key Cards
The library requires a copy of all new publications by law, but says Switch 2 Game-Key Cards aren’t eligible
Japan’s national legal deposit library says Switch 2 Game-Key Cards won’t be eligible as part of its video game preservation process.
The National Diet Library (NDL), which was established in 1948, is one of the largest libraries in the world and, similarly to other ‘legal deposit’ libraries like the British Library and the US Library of Congress, requires by law that every domestic publisher has to submit copies of every new publication for the purposes of preservation.
Since October 2000, this has included physical video game CDs and cartridges, with the NDL currently owning more than 9,600 video games housed in archival conditions.
However, as reported by Famitsu (via Automaton), the NDL has chosen not to include Switch 2 Game-Key Cards as part of its collection, because it doesn’t consider them physical media.
According to the report, NDL representatives explained that “only physical media that contains the content itself” can be preserved, and that “since a key card, on its own, does not qualify as content, it falls outside of [its] scope for collection and preservation”.
Game-Key Cards are Nintendo’s new branding for cartridges that still require the game to be downloaded from the Switch 2 online store before the game can be played. The cartridge doesn’t contain the game data, rather it’s simply a ‘key’ that enables a download.
There are benefits to such cards – unlike ‘code in a box’ releases they can be traded or resold, and they’re theoretically cheaper than ‘proper’ Switch 2 cartridges with the full game on the cart, because those have higher storage and speed specifications and cost more to manufacture.
However, numerous players say they don’t like Game-Key Cards because there’s no guarantee they’ll work forever, due to their need to connect to a Nintendo server to download the content. While it seems unlikely this will ever be deactivated in the near-to-medium term, it’s not known what will happen decades from now.
Further reading
Nintendo closed down the Wii U and 3DS eShops in 2023, making it impossible to buy digital games on either system, but it did add that “for the foreseeable future, it will still be possible to redownload games and DLC, receive software updates and enjoy online play on Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS family of systems”.
Before that, the Wii Shop Channel was shut down back in 2019, but players are still able to redownload previously purchased content at the time of writing, some 18 years after it originally launched.
Game preservationists have come out against the game-key card system. Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios (which specialises in modern remasters of older, often out-of-print games) told GamesIndustry.biz that “seeing Nintendo do this is a little disheartening”, adding: “You would hope that a company that big, that has such a storied history, would take preservation a little more seriously.”
Far Cry 4, Assassin’s Creed 3, and Revenge of the Savage Planet director Alex Hutchinson has also strongly criticized the game-key card system.
