Minimal News_

I get that Switch 2 games need faster storage, and that makes the traditional model of running games directly from the cart prohibitively expensive, but they could have just copied the Xbox/Playstation model of shipping physical games on slow media (Blurays in their case) and then having a mandatory installation step which copies the data to the fast internal SSD before you start playing. That way you're not entirely dependent on online services to play a physical game.

I think it's silly that the conversation on preserving games revolves around hardware. The hardware is irrelevant. It's about the right to create digital backup for personal use. Whether the game is downloaded or burned on a disc, it's just software.

The main problem used to be about piracy, but I think now it's really about making games as a service (even if they're not online for gameplay) because it allows more forms of monetization. The conversation should be about making games into a digital product that you can download and own the files. Piracy still happens anyway, and maybe this could make companies solve the problem differently, like only allowing digital backup for trusted players.

> Even when a cartridge does contain data on day one of release, games are so often patched, updated and expanded through downloads that the cart very often loses its connection to the game, and functions more like a physical copy protection dongle for a digital object

From preservation's perspective even the day-one release, no matter how buggy it is, is worth preserved. The speedrun community, for instance, often need to fix on an exact version of the game to compete, and a physical copy (implying a pinned revision) is often easier to agree on.

There are exceptions to this, when the day-one release is not playable. It is the trend happening in the software industry -- release early, even if it is literally unusable, because we can push a patch via the network -- that is disheartening.

In the computer games industry pretty much everything has been download only for some time as the assets are too large for DVD and BD never caught on for PC. Places like GOG provide unrestricted offline installers but the majority are provided via a storefront like Epic or Steam.

The worst case scenario for preservationists is for games to become a streaming service via cloud gaming, which publishers may like since it pretty much prevents piracy and allows them to charge a monthly fee rather than a one time license fee. For movies and music streaming exclusives aren't a new thing and improvements in network latency and bandwidth are making game streaming more and more viable.

The article already touches on this, but in the modern day the games that exist on physical media are pretty much useless without their zero-day patches. Putting physical media aside, companies rarely make older builds available, so even when media contains a game and servers are up there is already plenty of ‘lost media’ if you consider old and interesting (potentially hilariously broken) old builds of virtually every game.

I’ve realized this at some point, but video games are ephemeral and should really be enjoyed in the now. Even if you can perfectly preserve a game, and the means to play it, tastes change so quickly in gaming that a game that’s fun today might not be enjoyable even a year later.

With physical games, you're tied to how long your console and cartridge physically last.

With digital games, you're tied to how long the console's e-store lasts, which is guaranteed to be sunset.

Eventually I couldn't justify buying the console version of a game that I was willing to play on Steam.

Hot take: when a game is not able to be preserved, it is not worthy of preservation efforts. When it's not worthy of being saved for the future is it even worth playing today? My answer is no.

I can play all the on disk ps3 games I own, the downloadable ones are dust on the wind.

It's an imperfect solution to a real problem—Nintendo wants to use cartridges instead of discs for some good reasons, some not-so-good reasons—but the costs per cartridge are too high for cartridges big enough to hold modern games.

But you can look at it as a transferable license to otherwise digital games, and that's not bad. A console with entirely (or almost entirely) digital games would have no used game market, and that sucks both for sellers (which I don't do), and buyers (which I happily do).

It would be nice if there was some legal protection for the buyer that, by selling a physical license, that Nintendo be required to make the download itself available for some time period > 20 years.