Seems like its the end of physical media. Even game-key cards are pretty useless, its literally a key in plastic cartridge that Nintendo can "revoke" whenever they feel like it and you wont be able to do anything about it. Its basically digital license but for dumb people who need to have something on shelf.
There is nothing inherently wrong about digital licenses as long as platform is customer friendly (like Steam or GOG) but Nintendo is far from customer friendly.
3rd parties were doing the equivalent of the Game Key Card almost day one on Switch 1. They would purposely use a smaller than needed cart for their game and require the customer to download the rest of it. All because a bigger cart costs more $$$$ and not just the same x per gb but >x/gb more.
And then 3rd parties also started putting codes in the box instead of any sort of cart. Even a few handfuls of games that were carts before were turned into codes in the box. See a lot of Ubisoft games.
So Game Key Card to me is just putting a name to these practices.
Could Nintendo have squashed this as the platform owner? Yes. Why wouldn't they? They want to be accommodating to 3rd parties because they want 3rd party support. 3rd parties probably had a legit beef that between the platform royalty and cost of the cart and the fact their games don't generally sell that high quantities on Nintendo that the cart cost was burdensome. And even a show stopper for support.
I also presume this was an effort and perhaps rule to stop codes in the box going forward. For all I know some launch titles broke that theory already. But to me the other reason for Game Key Card is to ensure the customer gets an actual physical cart in the box when they buy physical. But again maybe that's presumptuous.
@strong_bonanza I wouldn't compare GOG to the others. They are DRM free, and you can just backup the installation files on 1000000000 drives, flash cards or whatever you want. You can literally create your own physical edition from GOG releases.
No other platform let you do that IF you do not count piracy ofc.!
GOG is truly special! After all they (CD Project RED) is one of the few that used a real cartridge for the Switch 2 and they proudly market it as such
Again, the Sonic Crossworlds grey disclaimer has more lines of text than the Civ grey disclaimer, suggesting it's the Switch 1 version + Switch 2 upgrade on one cartridge.
Switch Physical Collection - 1,529 games (as of November 20th, 2025)
Switch 2 Physical Collection - 3 games (as of November 23rd, 2025)
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Topic: Game-Key Card Boxed Release List
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