Nintendo explains why it made game-key cards for Switch 2

While many Nintendo Switch 2 owners have been enjoying the system so far, game-key cards are something that still isn’t sitting right with many. Now thanks to a shareholders meeting, we get to hear from Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa as to why they were made in the first place.

For those that haven’t been keeping up with the situation, game-key cards aren’t true physical releases. Although you get a cartridge, there’s basically nothing on it – you need to download all of the data first. Some feel that this defeats the purpose of what a physical release actually is.

During a Q&A with investors, Furukawa indicated that it comes down to file sizes that are much larger than the previous Nintendo Switch. It’s not unheard of now to see titles going well beyond 50GB. WWE 2K25, which was announced today, will actually be over 70GB.

Furukawa said (via machine translation):

“The game-key card used in the Nintendo Switch 2 does not contain the data for the main game, but instead stores a key to start the software. When playing for the first time, you need to connect to the Internet and download the data to play the software. From the second time onwards, you can play even in an environment without an Internet connection, but you need to insert the game-key card into the console.

This is one of the new software sales methods added because the data capacity of game software for the Nintendo Switch 2 is larger than that of the Nintendo Switch. There are various sales methods for software, so we would like to discuss various points with software publishers and strive to receive active support for our platform from them.”

Furukawa’s comments don’t fully reveal what’s going on behind-the-scenes. Many games are definitely largely now, but we’re still seeing smaller ones as well. There has previously been discussion and leaks indicating that publishers now only have a 64GB cartridge option on Nintendo Switch 2 (Switch 1 had several options), which isn’t ideal.