I am not in the market for a console (my last one was the Sega Mega Drive which was abandoned after we got a Pentium 1 PC and dialup), but I got to say, I love Nintendo's pricing policy.

It's almost as if they are taking the piss and want to see to what extent their fans are gluttons for punishment.

One possible complicating factor for those games? While they're physical releases, they use Nintendo's new Game-Key Card format, which attempts to split the difference between true physical copies of a game and download codes. Each cartridge includes a key for the game, but no actual game content—the game itself is downloaded to your system at first launch. But despite holding no game content, the key card must be inserted each time you launch the game, just like any other physical cartridge.

This is full on corporate regressiveness.

Nintendo will also use some Switch 2 Edition upgrades as a carrot to entice people to the more expensive $50-per-year tier of the Nintendo Switch Online service. The company has already announced that the upgrade packs for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom will be offered for free to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers. The list of extra benefits for that service now includes additional emulated consoles (Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64, and now Gamecube) and paid DLC for both Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Mario Kart 8.

Wait so you have to subscribe to get access to emulators (which are all open source I am assuming)? And you can't just buy a retro game (ala GOG) and play it to your heart's content? You need a sub to Nintendo online?

[–] wuzzlewoggle@feddit.org 45 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The key card thing is seriously infuriating, both from a consumer standpoint and from a media conservation standpoint.

Basically you own a game cartridge, but as soon as Nintendo shuts down their servers for whatever reason it becomes a useless piece of plastic. They really don't want us to own anything anymore.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io -2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm not sure that's how that works. The Switch already had both physical boxes with digital codes in them and cartridges that required mandatory downloads to run. This seems like a physical unlock key for a digital download, which depending on how it's implemented is actually easier to both resell and use offline than the Switch 1 solution to the same problem.

I don't recommend purchasing either, and I avoided both of those options on Switch 1, but I'm pretty sure this at least does not make things any worse.

I have major gripes with a number of pricing choices in this thing, but to the best of my current understanding this one is based on a misunderstanding.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

You cannot use the unlock key, or even redownload the game, when, not if, the Switch store goes offline.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 1 points 19 hours ago

This is true.

It's also true of the partial download carts for Switch 1 that don't include a full playable version of the game in the cart.

Presumably the digital back-compat on the Switch 2 means the Switch will live a lot longer usual for Nintendo platforms, and we don't know if there will be a backwards compatible Switch 3.

But in practice, this is just an iteration of the Switch 1 version of the same thing. It's not great. I avoided both the mandatory download carts and will likely avoid these ones, but it's not a bigger deal than it has been for the past five years or so.

[–] Kelly@programming.dev 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Their emulators have always been proprietary. The waters were a little muddied by the NES/SNES Classic consoles using a Linux OS but the emulators were their own code.

Their FOSS code is made available when required and is published here:

https://support.nintendo.com/jp/oss/index.html

[–] Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I see. I am surprised they didn't simply take existing open source code and go with that.

[–] PrinzKasper@feddit.org 3 points 6 days ago

They likely want to avoid legitimising those existing emulators.

[–] Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 week ago

Oh wow, that cartridge thing is actually just the worst of both worlds. I'm similar to you, my last console was a Mega Drive but I did get a Switch for my wife and played a couple of games on it which was fun. Not really keen on giving Nintendo more money though.

[–] Sixtyforce@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 week ago

So when Nintendo servers shut down, that's it.

[–] whodrankarnoldpalmer@startrek.website 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

So does this kill used game sales?

[–] XiberKernel@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I think it kills game leaks before the street date. Even if the data isn’t in the cartridge (which is stupid), you would still be able to sell the cartage assuming the online service is still active.

Sucks for game preservation though. I’m personally hoping there’s some flaw in the gen 1 hardware that can be exploited for archive purchases.

(edit: fixed autocorrect)

[–] Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

I am assuming you can re-sell the "Game Key".