With pre-orders for the Switch 2 finally open in most major markets, most of the attention this week has been focused on questions of launch supply and demand – with the basic assessment being that demand is sky-high despite the widespread grumbling about the price, while supply is clearly going to be heavily constrained for quite some time.

In the US, where feared price bumps due to tariffs have seemingly been limited to accessory prices (for now, at least), major retailers sold out of their pre-order allocations within minutes, widespread technical problems notwithstanding; in Japan, more than two million people reportedly entered a pre-order lottery for the system. A summer (and likely autumn, and winter) of empty shelves and price-inflating scalpers seems a near-certainty at this point – prepare for an unwelcome sense of déjà vu throwbacks to the PS5’s torrid launch year.

In the midst of the excitement over the pre-orders and nervous speculation about the impact of tariffs, something that has slid a little bit under the radar is a curious little wrinkle concerning a large swathe of the third-party software being launched with the Switch 2. Quite a few of those games appeared in retail listings alongside the pre-orders, which revealed that many publishers have opted to ship their software using Nintendo’s new “game-key cards” rather than conventional game cartridges.

The decision making on this seems a little arbitrary in places, with some games seemingly shipping on game-key cards in certain territories and real cartridges in others, but the overwhelming trend among third-party publishers seems to be towards preferring game-key cards. In Japan, for example, almost every third-party game announced thus far is launching as a game-key card.

Switch 2 was a perfect example case for the media to use to demonstrate the impact of tariffs on consumers

In essence, what this means is that when you buy a physical Switch 2 game from a third-party publisher, you’re most likely not going to get an actual game in the box. The game-key card is a new idea Nintendo has introduced for this console, seemingly in response to complaints from publishers about the high cost of manufacturing cartridges for the original Switch. It looks like a conventional Switch 2 cart, and it plugs into the console in the same way, but it only stores a license key for the software, not a copy of the game itself. To actually play the game, you’ll have to connect to the Internet and download it to the console’s own storage.

When the existence of this option was first mentioned, the suggestion appeared to be that this would be a “third way” for publishers to launch physical versions of games that would otherwise have been digital-only. In a sense it’s an evolution of a system Nintendo has been using for years in Japan – game cards for popular titles are sold in stores around the country, but contain just a plastic card with an e-Shop code on it rather than an actual game cartridge.

The benefit is that it allows people to buy digital games and give them to others as gifts, or to buy games without needing a credit card. The downside, of course, is that these games remain purely digital, the physical card component being useless once the code is redeemed. Game-key cards are an improvement on this in key ways, offering some of the advantages of physical games. They’re just as portable as physical games, meaning that owners can lend or resell them freely, which is a major consideration for many consumers (and especially for younger gamers who are perhaps the most likely to be the recipients of games as gifts).

In other respects, however, these are still digital titles masquerading as physical games. It’s impossible to play them without going online for a very large download (which is going to cause immense disappointment for anyone buying one of these games before a long flight, for example), and since they aren’t stored on the game card itself, management of your console’s storage remains a major headache.

There’s also a reasonable if quite distant concern over persistence of access. At some point, based on past form and hopefully a very long way down the line, Nintendo is likely going to announce that it’s ending online service support for Switch 2 consoles, and these game-key cards are going to become useless wafers of plastic and silicon trash, while “real” game cartridges remain playable.

“This is a change being driven by more fundamental economic factors, and few publishers will be willing to pass up the chance to save such a large chunk of costs in getting a game to market.”

If game-key cards were just replacing the e-Shop codes sold in convenience stores all around Japan, that would barely merit a mention – but from the launch details that have emerged, it’s clear that many publishers are actually treating them as the default way to release games on the Switch 2. While disappointing, this is not surprising. The other major advantage of the key-cards, of course, is that they’re significantly cheaper than actual game cartridges, which reportedly run publishers around $15 in manufacturing costs due to the Switch 2’s requirement for high-spec flash memory.

The risk of these being subject to tariffs will also be weighing on some publishers’ minds, but the decision to switch to key-cards clearly predates the tariff situation and applies far outside the United States. This is a change being driven by more fundamental economic factors, and few publishers will be willing to pass up the chance to save such a large chunk of costs in getting a game to market.

This situation is far from the biggest concern for Switch 2 as its launch approaches, but it does threaten to add quite an unpleasant wrinkle to the experience of using the console. Physical games will essentially become a two-tier experience: there will be games that you buy and can play instantly as soon as you insert them into the console, which is the real promise of a cartridge-based system, and then there will be games that you insert and are instead confronted with a long download time and the need to free up space on your device.

Nintendo’s packaging does at least label the game-key cards very clearly, but many consumers are unlikely to know what that actually means – especially those buying games as gifts for grandchildren, for example.

One could argue that this is just Nintendo’s user experience moving into line with what has been the norm on other systems for many years. After all, when you buy a physical game for your PS5, there’s generally a long installation process (because Blu-ray drives aren’t actually fast enough to run games from) and a large download to wait for (because modern games are never actually finished when they’re sent off to manufacturing).

This was deeply unpopular when it first became the norm but consumers quickly got used to it, even though it undermines a major part of the console user experience and value proposition. Switch 2 users will no doubt get used to a similar process, but publishers weighing up the pros and cons of game-key cards should be aware of how much the game-key card erodes one of the key differentiators of the Switch platform and should not kid themselves about the likelihood that this is creating a two-tiered perception of games on the system.

If the game-key card icon comes to be seen as a red flag for shovelware, the cost savings associated with it may be a pyrrhic victory indeed.