Topic: Pokemon Pokopia

@FishyS
There’s definitely an emotional component, sure, but I store all my cases in a tub at the bottom of my closet lol No display factor going in with me.

It’s just nice to be like… “Hey, I wanna play Kaze again.” I put the cartridge in and play. No updates. No redownloads if I had deleted it to free up space. No “checking to see if this software can be played. Oh, and no need to buy pricey express cards. Woof.

Because I just own it. On the cartridge.

And I do that a ton. I tend to play games first just finish and experience them, and then I like to loop back in a few months to really dig in and fully complete the ones I enjoyed at the first pass.

The bonus is that I can resell them if I wanted, but I haven’t sold any of my Switch games and have no plans to.

@rallydefault And I just own the digital game too. I can just play them when I want to. Even years or decades later. I play and replay pretty much the same way you just described. I say 'I want to replay Kaze' and then I just click the icon. I even have a server backup if my house burns down which is an extra perk. I admit that the time to redownload a game is a negative, but it has nothing to do with ownership or not. And most of my games can be redownloaded in the same time it takes to search for a game in a closet. And if you say 'well, Nintendo could eventually become evil and block digital if you don't have it backed up on an SD card', well, that's true. We know Nintendo could become evil and brick everyone's Switch 2s also. Evilness is a bit more likely than my apocalypse example, but I prefer to be more optimistic and not plan my life around either option.

I 100% agree with your bonus of being able to sell (or just lend) physical games. That's a great perk. But you can do that with Game Key Cards also which was the original point.

@FishyS
I'm not even talking about losing access through the eShop or anything, at least not at first. We'll get to that in a sec. I'm talking about the hassles that go along with digital "ownership."

Absolutely everyone who games mostly digital has had to clear space to make room for more games at some point. Some people do it pretty habitually, trying to get by on whatever storage they have. Express cards are, again, pretty pricey. What happens when you wanna play an old game after a few years of it being deleted? You gotta redownload it, so hopefully you're on WiFi. If it's a bigger game, then plan a couple hours ahead lol

What if you regularly game on a couple different Switches? I know a lot of us here do. I have my S2 and a Lite. When you do that and play the same game across 2 different systems, after every 3 hours the current console needs to connect to the internet to "check if this software can be played." Or you can reload the virtual game card. Either way, you still need the internet and Nintendo's "permission" to play the game. (This is actually one of the good points of the GKC - they do not need to do this, so we'll give credit where it's due.)

And like you said, ultimately you don't own your digital games. If Nintendo (or whatever company) so deems it, they can indeed block access and download AND even block our consoles. If you're physical, the only one there that applies is if they block all our consoles. I guess they could do that if they wanted to put themselves out of business in a spectacular fashion. BUT even then, you can only do that to the systems that are connected to the internet. And mine rarely is lol

Yep, that mild inconvenience versus the mild inconvenience to sort through physical games without having 100s of games one instant click away at any given time. I can understand having a preference of one or the other but fundamentally they are both pretty mild quibbles and either feels to me like an odd reason to avoid a game you want to play.

I believe it's once a week for things like NSO which need to be verified, not once every 3 hours. I often juggle between my Lite and my primary console (now Switch 2) and this has literally never been an inconvenience. Even when I travel, its a couple seconds to swap which my primary console is. Conversely, I can play the same game on 2 consoles at once which is occasionally useful. One of the two consoles has to be connected to the Internet if you want to use both at once but, well, wifi is almost everywhere? Unless you are in a park and for some reason want to swap games crazily between 2 handhelds...in the park. Although Game Key Cards would still allow that I believe.

I guess my point was more that technically you don't truly own your physical games either since Nintendo can brick or block everything. Sure, you could keep the physical cartridge but you can keep an SD card also. But all those are technicalities. The future is not 100% predictable-- games could be outlawed by the government and taken from us. Many things could happen, but for now and as far as we know, we own both physical and digital for the long term. 'what ifs' are a little silly when we have zero reason to believe they will happen.

@FishyS
Let’s at least stick to the facts, my friend: I never mentioned NSO games. I’m talking about regular digital games you “own.” That check is every 3 hours if you are switching between consoles.

I keep my cartridges in these little cases that hold 72 games each. Takes maybe half a minute to open the case and locate the title? And like… 6 square inches of space below my TV lol

Let’s pose this:

Having to “check if this software can be played”
or
inserting a cartridge and playing.

Which sounds like ownership?

Needing the connect to the internet to download/redownload a title from a server run by a company
or
Inserting a cartridge and playing.

Which sounds like ownership?

You don’t want to live your life beholden to “what ifs,” but if I can get used physical games cheaper than digital consistently, that’s the way I’m gonna keep going.

I edited that because I realized I wasn't sure what you were talking about so I guessed and made sure what I said was factual. My fault for misunderstanding. If there is an extra check swapping between my 2 consoles, it is apparently smooth and easy enough I haven't particularly consciously noticed it even though I swap a lot. I still don't understand in what situation someone would want to juggle games between two Switches and not have wifi. You are literally on the Internet right now. Even if you are some bizarre special anti wifi case, I guarantee to you that most people who don't like Game Key Cards are connected to wifi. Although, I'm pretty sure you can plug in the GKC into multiple consoles without Internet after the 1-time install anyways? Feel free to fact check me on that because I don't own any GKCs to check.

That's fair. You said 'in box at bottom of your closet' earlier which sounded far less convenient. So it is a difference between 30 seconds many time for physical and usually like 3 seconds for digital but occasionally a half hour or more to redownload. Either way, pretty mild inconvenience and as I said before, it is totally understandable that some people might prefer one method over the other. My only comment was that avoiding a specific game you want to play for that mild inconvenience seems pretty extreme.

Welcome to the modern world. What you described is essentially also what happens with banks and credit cards etc, but I still consider that I own that money in my account. It could all break and descend the world into chaos; let's hope it doesn't.

Totally valid, I used to do the same and still do sometimes. Recently I've been better at finding cheap prices digitally for most games personally. I assume the GKCs will also go on cheap physical sale used. Maybe even on better sales than typical given the bizarre hate towards them.

@FishyS
Yea, I did mention one of the good things with gkc is that they don’t make you do the internet check when switching consoles. I will always give credit where it’s due.

Yea, the box in my closet is just for the cases. I take the cartridges out of the cases. I’m like a kid lol

Realistically, if I’m 100% certain a gkc release is never gonna get a real physical and it’s a game I NEED to play (the FF remake, for instance), I’ll eventually end up getting a few of them.

But I still have faith something will change with this whole situation. I have more than enough to play at the moment while things continue to play out.

You could definitely be right but I'm not sure how long it will take. If things follow the usual process, the larger game cards will eventually be cheap as well as larger sd cards. So it might simulteously become less inconvenient to have GKCs but also less reason for companies to use them.

On the original topic, one thing that annoys me is that Nintendo (or Pokemon company) is playing the 'bad' part of both sides. Last gen they had digital be slightly cheaper than true physical since it is a higher profit margin. I feel like both digital and GKCs should have a discount off of the premium $70 price. No matter what you think about GKCs, it's definitely less premium.

@FishyS
It may take the better part of 2 years for things to solidify, is my guess. And at that point I’ll have to go with the flow, whatever that flow may be.

Digital and gkc should certainly be cheaper. I’m one who supports a solution where digital/gkc is cheap and the physical is limited and carries a premium. I would be fine with that. I’m supporting that model with Yooka Replaylee and Hades 2.

I can still redownload software on my 3DS. I've bought digital games for PC on Steam since 2005, twenty years later I can still download all of them. Obviously this is no guarantee for the future, but conversely, my physical Game Boy games with battery backup need new batteries. Some of my GBA games struggle with the physical connection, randomly "disconnecting" from the console without warning. I've tried with multiple GBA's, and the problem is the games because not all of them have this. Some of my DS games no longer work for a similar reason; the contacts seem to be borked after years of swapping them out. I might be able to repair them, but the point is: Physical isn't some "holy grail" of infinite availability. In fact most retro hardware is failing already without expensive repairs, and so are the cartridges or CD's.

All this is to say, I understand not wanting to let go of the rose tinted ideas of physical, but it is more emotional than factual. The real preservation is storing ROMs and assets on servers with redundant storage. Which is what Nintendo is actually doing with their digital games.

@OmnitronVariant
That is such an exaggeration.

My original GameBoy is still trucking. 30+ years. One faint line that goes across the screen near the bottom. Most GameBoy games didn’t even have batteries. For the handful that do, replacing the battery is a 5-minute job that anyone can do after watching a YouTube video, and you can buy a dozen of those suckers for like 10 bucks.

I still have my DS and GBA SP, too, both still working great with the DS just missing a pixel on the bottom screen.

My NES (original) and SNES (bought recently), same deal. Recapping capacitors is a once every 10-15 years thing (sometimes longer), costs about 20 bucks, and anybody can do it.

Sounds like you don’t take care of your retro stuff.

All things degrade, but if you store things sensibly, hardware is actually very resilient. Even motherboards that have stains and corrosion can be cleaned and saved.

I think its overstated that physical is the only way to own something and its understated that game key cards are obnoxiously cynical ways for companies to save money in order to waste space on your SD cards for no real benefit for me. That is enough reason for me to hate them forever. Inherently stupid purchase, just buy it digitally at that point, the box it would come with is a good example of "I'd rather have nothing."

Honestly, there was a small part of me hoping, for a brief moment, that they could download at least...enough of the game to the card, and that is what made them different from code in boxes. That would at least be SOMETHING to justify its existence.

And that's the big problem, they are cynically taking away from YOU. You need to get extra space even though you bought it at full priced at a store, its your problem that they could've avoided. They do not get the benefit of the doubt. They don't deserve it, I refuse for them to get any, especially not for a Pokemon game. It's why I've started to get into LRG and similar such retail releases for notable indie games, because I want the game on the cartridge, with no caveats.

@kkslider5552000 They’re digital license keys you can freely trade or resell, versus the account bound license from buying purely digitally. That’s what you get, that’s the upside. Do you not understand?

@OmnitronVariant
But it doesn't mean I have to give up with collecting physical games.
Old games might get corrupted from aging or get damaged by any unfortunate circumstances, but it will not stopping me to keep collecting physical games.

@Anti-Matter And I'm not saying you should. It's perfectly fine to prefer physical and want to collect physical releases, and refusing to buy anything that's purely digital. I just think some of the arguments against digital don't make much logical, rational sense, but I can certainly understand the emotional appeal.

For me personally physical stopped making sense when post-release patches became the norm and instruction booklets disappeared from boxes, the latter being an example of my own emotional opinion about one of the values of physical games

I would agree this is almost by definition one of the downsides of digital but it's worth noting that improving tech over time somewhat mitigates it. For example when we were being told to clean out our Wii SD card fridges I had just recently upgraded from a 256kbps to an 8Mbps internet connection. The biggest HDD I had was the one in my desktop which would've been 120GB. And that SD card people were putting in their Wii to clean the fridge into would've been maybe 2GB or so? As a guess. So redownloading and moving stuff around, even Wii Ware sized stuff, was a hassle

Fast forward to the start of the Switch era I believe it would've been 2018 or our internet service tech got upgraded and we were able to move from 8Mbps to 50Mbps. The microSD card I first put into my Switch was IIRC a 32GB card to double the storage which, did the trick for a bit. The biggest HDD I had in the house was a 2TB drive which sat in a I believe at this point two disk RAID 1 config, so 2TB

Fast forward even further to today. The Switch 2 releases and on day 1 I look at the microSD express cards and I can probably hold out for a bit. But if I was to pull the trigger. the storage seems like the economical short term play. It's just this time it's 256GB. Meanwhile my internet tech and plan just got upgraded so I'm now on 500Mbps with the fastest plan I could get now being 2.5Gbps. And the largest HDD I have in the house is a 10TB drive which lives in my NAS in a 14TB four disk software RAID

So if we're talking relatively speaking, and lets say we're talking about a 10GB file. In the Wii "cleaning the fridge" era that takes me a bit under 3 hours to download, takes 5 SD cards, fills up 1/10th of my biggest storage device. In the early Switch era that same thing takes 30mins to download, chews up 1/3rd of my microSD card, fills up 0.5% of my NAS. Today? Same file. 3mins, 4% of the MicroSD Express card and a rounding error on my NAS. Yes games also got bigger over that same time, but not by the same rate as the internets got faster and drives got bigger

Obviously, bandwidth on the Switch 2 is going to cap at 1Gbps. Maybe I have a post 1Gbps service 10 years from now, but if I do I'm not going to see those speeds on Switch 2. But storage? I think I can confidently say that storage won't be the issue it is now. Because even on Switch 2 it's less of an issue with the increased game sizes than it was for the Switch at launch

I think internet speeds and access to storage space is definitely two major individual factors that can, if both are negatives (ie. poor/metered internet connections and no extra storage space) going against choosing digital. In this particular game's case it's also a smaller game download, and so also takes up less storage.

In my case I live in Norway and I have a 1 gigabit fibre connection to my apartment, and it's also a so-called "point 2 point" connection, ie. not shared by anyone else in between — the standard for modern fibre. Which means I actually get 1 gigabit download and upload, even synchronously. So obviously that's a major factor in me going digital, although that being said, the Switch 1's abysmal download speeds was a major pain. It'd spend an hour downloading a game I knew my PC could've downloaded in a minute flat.

Back on the topic of Pokopia: I think digital makes sense for this game for reasons I've already explained. It's a survival crafty type game and I can foresee it getting lots of updates over time in the form of collabs, new Pokémon and decorative items, etc. For better or worse. I'd love it to be a one and done game — and maybe it will be and digital is purely cost effective, in which case I'll gladly don my clown makeup for a day.

@skywake @OmnitronVariant
You have a point: this is probably going to be one of "those games" that just constantly gets patches and evolves over time, to the point where the version that comes on the cartridge would look pretty foreign in a couple years.

You could say games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe were relatively similar when they started adding all the tracks, and eventually they printed cartridges that included all the patches and stuff, but I still take your point.

As for internet speed, I'm in the U.S. And here, as you can imagine, it's pretty cutthroat. You're beholden entirely to the area you live and the providers that are available. I'm in Pennsylvania, which is an East Coast state and pretty happenin, but in my specific area Comcast is the only internet provider. And if I want anything over like 100mbs for my internet, I'm gonna be paying well over a hundred bucks a month once all of their deceptive "promotional period" stuff expires. It's insane.

Yeah, Comcast is super evil; I'm stuck with them too. But even at 100mb/s, it is only a few hours for FF7 remake, which will be by far the largest game I have ever owned. And I pre-ordered so it will download by itself overnight a couple days before release. That is an extreme case, but most of the games I own are a gigabyte or less so download in seconds or a few minutes at worst. Even the standard Switch 1 first party games are pretty darn fast to download. Switch 1 had slower downloads so this is all nicer for Switch 2.

Less than download speed, the big games are more painful for storage. FF7 will be like half of internal storage 😶 In a couple years, 512GB or 1 TB sd express cards will be cheap enough that it won't matter much, but right now it hurts to use that much space for one game instead of 100 smaller games. Huge sd cards are cheap for Switch 1, but the change to express has definitely temporarily put us in a worse spot than we were at the end of the Switch 1 gen. It's not really that problematic; I'll just archive many of my small games and quickly download them when I want to. It's just a little less convenient than with Switch 1. By the end of the Switch 2 generation, I assume we'll be in speed and storage paradise.

I understand that, and with that understanding, I do not particularly want them to exist.

I want to be clear that at THE VERY LEAST, in the context that they are being done to avoid spending extra money for proper physical releases they would've done if there was no alternative way to have the game boxes in a store, I want them to not exist. I want zero video games to be released where they could've made any profit at all from a normal physical release where they then avoid that physical release and do a GKC because it would be cheaper. I want that to never happen EVER. Do you understand?