Ian Carlos Campbell is a Contributing Reporter at Engadget, where he covers the big companies making screens for your pockets, and the weird ways they intersect with entertainment industry. Prior to Engadget, Ian was an Associate Editor at Inverse focused on AR, VR and mobile technology.
world, Nintendo is trying to rethink how sharing games works. The biggest announcement from the company's latest Direct was its upcoming, a new approach to sharing digital games that improves on the company's current system, but still carries limitations that keep it from feeling truly modern.
Virtual Game Cards attempt to make digital games as easy to share as physical ones. That starts with the company visually representing games as "cards" and using the language of loading and ejecting them, and extends to how simple they are to share. Two Switch consoles logged into your Nintendo Account can share any digital game just by "ejecting" it from one and "loading" it on another. The only catch is that the consoles need to be connected over local wireless when the trade happens, and be able to access the internet to download the game and run it for the first time.You can similarly share a Virtual Game Card with anyone in the same Nintendo Account family group for two weeks, after which the game automatically returns. In both cases, saves for each game stay on the console where the game was played, making it simple to share the Virtual Game Card again and keep playing., which requires defining a Switch console as "primary" and able to be used offline and other devices as a "secondary" and needing an internet connection to play shared games, Virtual Game Cards are a meaningful improvement. If you're a parent trying to share games with your kids or a super-fan with multiple Switches , Virtual Game Cards have basically solved the problem — or at least made it much easier to manage and understand. The company isn't exactly leading the pack here, though. If I own a game on PlayStation, I can download it on my Playstation 4 and PlayStation 5, and play on either console, without needing to go through the rigamarole of ejecting virtual cards. The same goes for Steam games. Valve even goes further and lets the vast majority of games be shared and played on accounts connected to the samePeople are highly sensitive to any kind of DRM. Just ask Xbox, which had big plans to change how loaning games work when the Xbox One was announced, but had to Nintendo isn't pulling an Xbox, per se, but it is pitching something adjacent. Virtual Game Cards are inarguably better than how things work now, but they require an internet connection and they still limit how many people can play a game at once. Nintendo came up with a better mental model for sharing games, but not necessarily a better way to do it.
Nintendo Nintendo Account Digital Games Sharing Games Virtual Game Cards Virtual Game Card
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