Nintendo Co. Ltd. President Shuntaro Furukawa has made a new statement about the Switch 2’s Game-Key Cards, but it doesn’t really tell us anything new.
OatmealDome shared his translation of this Q&A from Nintendo’s latest investor meeting on BlueSky. In his words:
Investor: I’ve seen opinions on the Internet saying that Game Key Cards are unappealing. I’m concerned that if third party titles using Game Key Cards don’t sell well, it will discourage third parties from supporting the Switch 2.
Furukawa: We introduced the Game Key Card because game file sizes are larger on the Switch 2 compared to the Switch 1. We have various ways to distribute games on the Switch 2, and we are working with our third party partners to ensure their support for our platform.
Furukawa’s statement mirrors those provided by Nintendo of America President Doug Bowser’s own assertion about Game-Key Cards. In an interview last May, weeks before the launch of the Switch 2, he said that:
Game-Key Cards are a way that our publishing partners are able to bring more content onto the platform, deeper and larger, more immersive content.
We’re sure that you’ve already heard about the discourse surrounding Game-Key Cards to no end. What we will point out is that Furukawa did not answer the investor’s question if Game-Key Cards sold well on the Switch 2 at launch. As we know, only a handful of games sold at retail for its launch had a complete game in the cartridge. Subsequently, there were also Switch 2 games that were only codes in boxes, but those were even less common. Most turned out to be Game-Key Cards, and none of those Game-Key Cards were third party games.
As reported by NintendoLife two weeks ago, the first reported numbers by the Game Business and Circana did seem to hint that Game-Key Cards did sell poorly for the Switch 2. CD Projekt RED proudly announced that Cyberpunk 2077, which they took great pains to ship complete in a Switch 2 Game Card, was one of the best-selling Switch 2 launch games, only behind Nintendo’s titles.
Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad chimed in on this discourse, arguing that there are other reasons that third party games didn’t sell that well at the Switch 2’s launch other than being packaged as Game-Key Cards. But what we think is important here is that Furukawa did not confirm or deny those rumors. We shouldn’t discuss this talking point as if we know that that is what actually happened, because it may be that the industry sees it completely differently than we do.
