[STEAM] How long will Switch 2’s Game Key Cards keep working?

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Last month, Nintendo and its third-party partners revealed that

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of the "physical" games on the Switch 2 would be made available

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Unlike traditional physical Switch games—which contain flash memory with the necessary data to play the game on the card itself—these key cards will simply enable the holder to download a copy of the game to their system and play that copy if and when the transferable key card is inserted in the system.

Already, many players are thinking ahead to what this means for their ability to play Game Key Card releases well into the future. It's not hard to find potential Switch 2 owners publicly worrying about games

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or becoming "effectively a worthless piece of plastic/e-waste" when Nintendo eventually disables its Switch 2 game download servers. Some go even farther, calling a Game Key Card

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rather than a real game purchase.

While these are valid long-term concerns, I think some players are underestimating the likely timeline for when Game Key Cards will become "useless e-waste." As it stands, we already have an example of Nintendo supporting continued downloads of games purchased nearly two decades ago and counting.

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