As I understand it, the key card does need to be inserted to play the game. It's not just a redemption code, it's a key to download and play it.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Oh, gross, thank you for the answer, though.
It's meant to be just like a regular card, but you just have to download the game instead of it being on the card.
My understanding is that the game is not tied to your account though, so this enables lending and selling your game.
Hmm, not all bad news, I guess. But can’t you also now lend eshop games? Or am I misunderstanding something? (If I had friends I would test these things myself).
You can lend eshop games to people in your family group
But you have to be near each other physically, I think.
Correct
The key card acts like any physical that has a complete overhaul post launch. The physical goes in, the game plays from internal storage. It contains no game data, and you have to download the full game from the server.
So, I have a hacked switch 1 and I can assure you that any game that has had a "complete overhaul post launch" still uses about 80% of the data on the cartridge. Or rather, it loads the entirety of the cartridge, and then every update to the game after that gets strapped on top of it to overwrite whichever sections of the game it needs to or adds new stuff.
So let's take animal crossing for example. If there were 2 major updates for Animal Crossing, youd have something akin to the following list of files:
-
Animal Crossing New Horizons.nsc[8 GiB] (the cartridge itself, if you dumped it - in this case we're referring to the actual cart itself here though) -
base.nsp[16 B] (some kind of token file for DLC attach points or something) -
184810dheincoiepn02.nsp[300 MiB] (patch 1) -
01849...ahd4819.nsp[24 MiB] (patch 2)
The switch loads the entirety of the cartridge, then it loads the base patch over the top of it to hook into the right location, then it loads patch 1 over the top of that, then it loads patch 2 over the top of patch 1, base, and the cartridge. Theoretically you could delete the latest update file and still have a working downgraded game. No original data is lost.
That's not a complete overhaul, I'm talking about something like Fortnite from 8 years ago to now. That's no shared code left. That's not a game that came on cartridge, obviously, but Animal Crossing only got a few tweaks and some additional content. It isn't an example of what a key card represents.
Does it write to the card, or does it just write to your storage?
Your storage
Thanks. I had hoped it'd be the cart itself
Oh, second question, just out of curiosity: is there a copy of the Switch firmware on a game key card, like there was on Switch 1 carts (and probably Switch 2 carts also)?
The system update would come from the internet in this case as well.
This only helps in areas where internet is scarce or non existent. Even banned switches are allowed to download firmware updates even if everythint else is blocked (source: just did this myself recently)
This really was only meant as a hypothetical. The Switch 2 requires a launch day firmware update; that is probably on the launch day carts: is it also on the launch day game key cards?
Even if it did have firmware, the card is burned months ahead of shipping, and launch day firmware was finalized only days or weeks before launch. A game that comes out 6 months later might have launch day firmware, but that's likely outdated by the time of release.
Isn’t the entire point of including the firmware on carts to ensure your system meets the minimum requirements to run the game? Packaging a non-functional version would be ridiculous.
Game Key Cards won't function without connectiong to the internet to download anyway, so there's probably not much point in including firmware updates on those.
I don't believe it does. From what I've heard the Game Key Cards don't even contain the game icon.