Nintendo has been contacting some customers with a survey link, asking questions that are primarily focused on people’s thoughts about physical versus digital games, and especially the Switch 2’s game carts that don’t actually contain the game. The link for the survey is being widely shared, and while it’s not clear if Nintendo will properly log responses from those who weren’t deliberately contacted, the sheer volume of attention it’s receiving is bound to grab the company’s attention.
“Imagine you are purchasing a new Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch 2 game for yourself,” the survey asks at one point before describing different ways publisher distributes games. These include, “Physical, requiring digital download,” which is described as, “The physical cartridge allows the download of a full digital game to the console. The cartridge must be inserted into the console to play the game. The cartridge can be shared and resold.” People can then respond to this notion with options ranging from “Definitely would buy” to “Definitely would not buy.” Whichever you choose, it’ll ask you why you made that decision, with a box to type your answer into. It then asks the same of buying games for others as gifts. “Because I don’t want to buy someone the idea of a game,” a person might type.
The Switch 2’s “game key cards” have proven extremely controversial since the notion was announced. Last week’s desultory Nintendo Direct re-ignited this frustration, with a series of previously revealed games that people struggled to find enthusiasm for, made worse by the knowledge that so many would game key cards–in other words, fake carts that simply contain an instruction to download the game from the eStore.
It’s tempting to view the game key cards as a step up from digital purchases, given you now have at least a physical object that can be resold or shared, and to some extent that’s true. However, it remains a hugely bad deal for customers, given that the cart will only work for as long as Nintendo maintains the servers it connects to. And given all of gaming history, that’s inevitably nowhere near as long as anyone would hope. As such, unlike your Game Boy cartridges from 1989 that will still work just as well today, all of these gameless key cards will be useless pieces of plastic in twenty years time. (And you can bet your hat that Nintendo will still be ruthlessly suing anyone who tries to make those lost games available by other means.)
As a result, people are leaping on this survey to express their views about this issue. Clearly Nintendo is aware it’s an issue, given that the survey is dominated by this topic. However, it’s unclear whether unsolicited responses will be counted by the company when survey company Qualtrics hands over the results. Even though the URL can be stripped of all its identifying post-? details, there’s a chance it will still look for an ID that isn’t there and not count the response. But, and it’s a crucial but, given the attention this survey is now getting, and the press coverage responding to that, it’s impossible that Nintendo won’t at the very least notice the sudden spike in reaction. Heck, it’s all we’ve got. It seems worth a try.
