Topic: Pokopia: Digital or Game-key Card?

I'm curious what people are thinking between buying digital or game-key card. With the upcoming Pokopia release (or just Pokopia as an example); what is / what would be your choice? Both is off course a download (i would like it more to just buy physical), and while i like a game card case for the collection, with the kind off maybe daily playing Pokopia just digital download is more convenient to prevent daily swapping games.

Neither. My hype for the game nosedived off a cliff when the "physical" was revealed to be a GKC. I hope other people enjoy it though, the game itself looks pretty good.

Unless you regularly sell games, GKC is just a waste of space and waste of time.

It is not. You can lend it to your friends and family for however long you want, which you can't do with purely digital games. For households like mine, where me and my spouse both have a Switch, GKCs are certainly preferable to digital games, since we only need to buy one copy of a game.

Here we go another GKC are evil thread and you dont own the game thread. Do we really need a other one of these threads?

Game Key Card for me, because at least I can sell it later or trade it in at a store if I want to.

I will probably wait a while, then buy a second-hand GKC to have a play and see what it's like, then sell it on again, hoping to minimise losses.

@Tasuki Yeah i was interested because this looks like the first 'Mainline Nintendo'-ish release (a.k.a. Pokemon) only on GKC and was curious i've maybe this time around people would have a different reasoning.

@Tedddddy I am STRICTLY against game-key cards! BUT if you just want to buy the game play it and then sell it get the key-crap-card. Otherwise just get it digitally and do not support game key-cards!

Neither of them.
I hate game key card.
I don't like digital games.
I hate the convenience from being digital games.
I want proper physical games with game data inside the cartridge or disc.
I would rather swapping the cartridge or disc before playing than tapping the digital games app icon.
I'm already get used to play with physical games.
But Pokopia have no proper physical release so I just ignore the game.
I felt sour to see game key card treatment on almost every Switch 2 games.

@OmnitronVariant, I presume that because while digital does have its flaws (physical does too), it doesn't have all the flaws that physical does, and it's also saved to your account.

The thing about Game Key Cards is that they are the worst of both worlds: they can corrupt and die and aren't saved to your account like physical, but still take up a lot more storage space on your console like digital.

At least going digital has a few perks over physical (not needing to switch cartridges, saved to your account), while Game Key Cards just take the flaws of both formats and mush them together.

I'm likely to buy it digitally personally. I haven't buy any more physical games after thr first 2 years of switch 1 and zi think i'm happier for it in general (beyond when I got sucky games, but that just mwans the physical can't be sold too, so I suppose it doesn't really matter)

Given the high price I haven't decided whether to buy the game or not yet, but if I do it will likely be digital unless I find a super cheap physical copy.

I suspect it is slightly more reliable than a normal physical cart since there is a whole lot less data to corrupt.

But yeah... I would argue it has the biggest advantages of physical (can be traded and sold) but also one of the biggest disadvantages of digital (takes up more storage space)

@OmnitronVariant, I'm talking about how in general, cartridges die over time. I'm pretty sure that sort of thing will happen to GKCs as well.

Full game on cartridge > GKC > digital > code in the box.
In the case of Pokopia, I wouldn't buy it in any format, I have no interest in that game XD

In an ideal world, all games would be offered on both physical carts and GKCs, with the latter being priced appropriately lower.

To keep it more on topic: if I had a greater interest in building games and Pokopia could be redeemed for a voucher, that's how I would be getting it.

Yea… game looks cool, but I’m gonna wait and hope they loop back some day and do a full physical release with all the DLC it’s bound to get.

This is a pretty agreeable point. One of the issues and clear cut "giving the game away" parts of this is how GKCs, even if not always intentionally, feel like saving a few bucks and not passing any of that onto the customer. That's why I think FFVII Remake is easily the best/most justified GKC release for actually doing just that. And unfortunately, most major game companies have earned zero benefit of the doubt for doing this for any reason other than to try to cynically, endlessly make more profit than last year.

But yeah, in a world where both exists, there would be a lot more of a worthwhile discussion on the merit of gkcs, instead of them feeling like yet another example of trying to take things away from people and justify even more profit until you either own nothing and are happy or are priced out of gaming.

@OmnitronVariant Because I collect and play from physical media (games). Game key cards are for people that resell their games, I can't ever see myself doing that. If I have to resell a game why even buy it in the first place? I say that because I do not buy games I would not like (research before buy).

And game key cards are made for cheap publishers that do not want to take risk with their games or they already know they will not sell well.

And let's not forget useless plastic. With physical the plastic still has playable data on it.

The game key cards are the worst of both physical and digital.

That's easy: because digital is a format that offers a legitimately different set of advantages and disadvantages than physical. Whereas keycards are "all the disadvantages of digital combined with all the disadvantages of physical", and whose main motivation for publishers to use is bad faith. There is essentially no good reason for a customer to favor keycard over digital, with the sole benefit being an entirely theoretical ability to resell it ( which is contingent on there being an actual thriving aftermarket for the things ). Conversely, there are very good reasons to not support it, for the same reason as its good to discourage publishers from selling things like "code on a slip in a box"- its an exploitive effort to have the sales benefits of a retail product, without actually being willing to pay for a retail product.