Topic: How to make sure you can play all your games in distant future?

Hey everyone,

I was recently wondering:
One day Switch will be discontinued. EShop Servers will surely be up for a few more years, but eventually they too will get shut down. What are the necessary preparations so you can still play your library at a (waaay) later date? I guess you need to

• re-download all archived games and store them locally (on a large SD card)
• trigger the download of every game's latest updates and DLC
• possibly make a clone of that SD card as a backup, should the first one fail in 20 years or so. Is cloning of the Switch SD card possible? Can you make a copy from the console, or via your computer?

Anything I forgot? I'm asking cause I never had an SD card, so I archived most of the games I finished. And was thinking... even for the games that I have on cartridge (most of them) I'll lose the updates and DLC if I don't download those before the servers are gone.

Cheers

I'm just hopeful that some company develops fpga hardware that will make use of Switch cartridges. Perhaps Analogue will offer something years from now? About 40% of my collection consists of cartridges that have zero post-patching. For those, I won't have to worry about the Switch servers eventually going offline down the road.
https://www.analogue.co/pocket

@Magician Hm my impression is that almost all games get patches these days... pretty much defeats the choice of physical games over downloads if you're still not future-proof :/

I didn't get the bit about a hypothetical FPGA console, what would that do about the problem of updates and DLC no longer being available? Or were you talking about Switch retro-gaming in general?

Switch retro-gaming in general. Something like twenty or thirty years from now.

Yeah I wonder if someone will find a way to preserve the patches and DLC too. I hate when things are lost to time just because noone cared.

AFAIK the patches and DLC stays on the cart as well as Digital games saved to the SD card if you did the setup correctly. Only Saved data are on the internal storage.