this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
45 points (78.5% liked)
Nintendo
21503 readers
132 users here now
A community for everything Nintendo. Games, news, discussions, stories etc.
Rules:
- Stay on topic.
- No NSFW content.
- No hate speech or personal attacks.
- No ads / spamming / trolling / self-promotion / low effort posts / memes etc.
- No linking to, or sharing information about, hacks, ROMs or any illegal content. And no piracy talk. (Linking to emulators, or general mention / discussion of emulation topics is fine.)
- No console wars or PC elitism.
- Be a decent human (or a bot, we don't discriminate against bots... except in Point 8).
- All bots must have mod permission prior to implementation and must follow instance-wide rules. For lemmy.world bot rules click here
- Links to Twitter, X, or any alternative version such as Nitter, Xitter, Xcancel, etc. are no longer allowed. This includes any "connected-but-separate" web services such as pbs. twimg. com. The only exception will be screenshots in the event that the news cannot be sourced elsewhere.
Upcoming First Party Games (NA):
Game | Date
|
Donkey Kong Bananza [S2] | Jul 17 Drag x Drive [S2] | Aug 14 Pokémon Z-A | Oct 16 Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment [S2] | 2025 Kirby Air Riders [S2] | 2025 Metroid Prime 4 | 2025 The Duskbloods [S2] | 2026 Rhythm Heaven: Groove | 2026 Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream | 2026 Spaltoon Raiders [S2] | TBA
[S2] means Switch 2 only.
Other Gaming Communities
- Gaming @ lemmy.ml
- Games @ sh.itjust.works
- World of JRPG's @ lemmy.zip
- Linux Gaming @ lemmy.ml
- Linux Gaming @ lemmy.world
- Patient Gamer @ lemmy.ml
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And if this practice continues for Switch 2 games, or was in practice for the Wii U, or etc etc...
It's a bad practice, even if right now there are ways around it for one game. It's a bad practice even if it's only for the current console on the current firmware. It turned a physical copy someone bought into a keycard. I'm of the opinion that all physical console games have been keycards since the day they started having day 1 patches, but at least that argument has the reasonable counterpoint of "you can still play the buggy incomplete v1.0 that's on the cart/disc, that makes it better than Switch 2 Game Key Cards, which are better than account-locked Digital Games".
This is direct and complete proof that your physical copy means nothing. The company can still restrict your access whenever they want to. The Switch 1 still gets firmware updates, after all, and firmware updates can't be rolled back. The physical copy guarantees fuck all in the face of every preservation concern that's a criticism of digital downloads. DRM-free digital and piracy are the only trustworthy methods of preservation.
FWIW, this likely just has to do with backwards compatibility fixes, since S2 is software emulation rather than hardware. I don't think they're likely to go back and intentionally restrict anything on Switch 1 through new firmware updates.
I agree that in an era of patches, physical copies are becoming increasingly imperfect from a preservation perspective, but I hesitate to say they mean nothing. Depends on the game really, and how complete it is at launch.
Correction: Switch 2 Back-compat is not emulation. It is a compatibility layer in the same vein that the Steam Deck runs Windows games despite running on Linux.