Game key cards (and discs for update-reliant or online-focused games) are in a weird place. The main reasons people claim to care about physical games are “preservation” and “used games” and those don’t actually overlap.
From the preservation standpoint, GCKs and discs that don’t have the whole game are both pretty shit. There’s an argument that buggy broken v1.0 is better than nothing and that’s objectively true, but neither of these things provide actual software preservation in the face of (for example) storefront closure or account banning. GCKs and all discs are useless for preservation of online games, of course: what are you doing with that Highguard or Concord disc? A further argument is that even a complete game burned to a disc that relies on DRM isn’t truly preserved as it won’t outlive the death of the DRM boxes themselves, when every Nintendo 3DS dies you’re not going to be able to play that pristine physical copy of Pokémon Moon.
A completely different appeal for physical games is simply the ability to resell. Your gaming budget goes a longer way if instead of spending $60 three times to play three games, you’re spending $45 three times and also selling the games for $30 after you’re done with them. You could play ten first-party single player Nintendo games legally on the Switch for $0 if you always bought used and sold the used copies for the same price you bought them for. Game-Key cards and discs for incomplete/online-only games do facilitate this perfectly, though GCKs lose all value when the CDN of the storefront closes and discs only lose most value in this situation.
raze2012@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Yeah, there’s 3 different lenses here. Preservation, ownership, and piracy.
It’s a bit of a hot take, but I don’t value “preservation” in the way most gamers do. I prefer it instead of not, but my lens here is as simple as “piracy will always be the true preservation mechanism”. The ability to back up your games is legal and technically that game lying on my computer is “preservation”. But preservation without distribution is gatekeeping in a way. Distribution is what ensures true preservation, but we cross into piracy.
What I do value is ownership and as you said, Game Key Cards give you all the benefits of ownership at the cost of preservation. It can theoretically be useless one day, and when that happens I see it as free game to pirate. But technically I believe even online Wii games you own can still be downloaded, despite not being able to buy on the store anymore. So we’ll see how long that lasts.
pory@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Piracy is the most consistent and solid form of preservation, definitely. Well technically piracy is a subset of “DRM-free software” which is the true holy grail. To preserve software, it must be able to be copied instead of tied interminably to something perishable like a disc or single hard drive. And piracy needs to be happening during the release windows of the software, not “be respectful and wait 5 years” - the only reason retro console libraries are as well-kept as they are is because people were dumping games to play for free back in the day.
Those Wii redownloads are tied to specific console IDs, and those console NANDs are just as vulnerable to damage or deletion or loss as normal physical media is. They’re even worse than account-based DRM’d media since account-based media at least tolerates hardware damage or loss (but not account bans or service EOL). Thankfully, every digital purchase on Nintendo platforms other than Switch 2 is fully preserved and made available. This would be impossible if Nintendo’s anti-piracy measures had ever worked for an entire console generation. Switch 2 games, on the other hand, are currently “loseable”. You might be reasonably sure that Nintendo will never delist DK Bananza until (insert threshold where you think it’d be acceptable here) but game preservationists also care about game versions.