I hope this isn’t a preparation for dropping physical games with the Switch 2. I won’t buy a console that doesn’t have physical games.
I doubt they’ll drop them with the Switch 2, but it’s an inevitablity that it will happen in the future. Physical game sales are becoming pitifully low.
It took them until 2025 to figure out digital ownership isn’t about the serial number on your console.
This fucking company.
Doesn’t address the main advantages physical games have over digital sharing. I’ll be interested once they have features that let me “switch cartridges” with a friend offline, or let me sell or gift my virtual cartridge to a stranger.
All videogames are digital since Pong or something.
We need to go back to analogue video games, played on oscilloscopes.
Sounds like the Steam family sharing feature. Good on them for catching up on this! Microsoft and Sony have yet to.
On the previous generation (which seems to be a lifetime ago now) Microsoft got badly burned on trying something like this, because they did it (and announced it) spectacularly wrong.
They wanted to allow game sharing by tying it to a system where you wouldn’t be able to play your own games if your console wasn’t online, so it could always track who’s supposed to play every game. Lots of people shat on their announcement, because, understandably, fuck needing an internet connection to play offline games.
Sony exploited that saying their console would not need to stay always online and mostly “won” that generation’s console announcement, while Microsoft hastily backpedaled to the usual too, probably costing them quite a bit since release was so close.
So in the end I think both were very reluctant to try the kind of DRM that would allow sharing again.
The 2 week thing is silly in my opinion since I already have a setup where I configure one system the primary and the other as secondary and that means all my games are in both systems. I wish it worked more like a real cart I can shared it out as long as I want then rip it back when I want to.
Seeing as digital-only seems to be the future whether we like it or not, this seems like a good initiative.
