Game Key Cards. It’s been a year since the Switch 2 has released, how have these affected your third party buying habits on the system? Me personally I’ve only gotten 3 (and that’s because of the Resident Evil Generations Pack) other than that I’ve been avoiding them like the plague. So far I’ve gotten a few third party games that are full on the cart like Cyberpunk and the surprising Indiana Jones. Crazy how I use to avoid the third party Switch 1 games that had a download and now I would gladly take them over these.

The big reason people dislike them is because 10-15 years down the line, Nintendo might not have the download options ect.
Meaning the key card becomes juist plastic junk, at that point.

However the counter argument is this:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY16S5x3dHc

The same thing happens with games that are on the Cartridge as well.
New firmware makes it so, you cannot play a offline game, if your system knows that there are patches to it, without updates.
Essentially bricking the game, if you cannot download the patch (which 20years down the line, you might not be able too).

*edit:
This is bad for game preservation.
Afaik, Xbox does the same thing.... I think only the PS5 of the 3 consoles actually values allowing you to play a game, where you have the intire game on disc, if in future say there is no way to download patches ect.

If we're talking big AAA third-party projects? I will only ever purchase those on PC since I would rather play at 60FPS. If we're talking smaller releases which run at similar specs on Switch 2 as on PC? Then I often go with downloading the Switch 2 version (and maybe purchase a physical copy of the Switch 2 game given it isn't GKC). So... GKC hasn't impacted my purchasing habits much at all.

That's a solid counter argument if I've ever read one. Lol! (I'm assuming VGChartz is bugging out?)

Check it now :)

I very rarely play third party games 15 years down the road.  Chrono Trigger and Tales of Symphonia are probably the only non first party Nintendo or Sony game I would want to play years later.

Yeah I guess most people are like that.... so in reality it is more of a irrational fear.
Yes it will happen at some point, but by then, most wont care.

So basically the downsides to Game Keycards are small. 

Not really, you can still download the games on thr wii and dsi. Even with the eshops closed the downloads are still possible on everything you already bought. 

I had to google this. 
Turns out your right.... which again, just points towards the "irrational fear" thing I spoke off.

Also kudos to Nintendo for still keeping servers up, to update old games from the Wii era.

Interesting. This is the first time I've heard of this. I still think cartridges are the better deal (never gonna buy a GKC) though now I might reconsider getting games on PS5 instead since I know they don't have that problem.

Someone in the comments of that video talks about a possible solution though. If you factory reset your console, the games won't need to update since you'll be wiping your console's database clean. Plus, the games only need to update once you have updated them, so, in theory, if you play the games without updates (most of the ones I've played play fine regardless) you won't have this issue.

I'm aware this is a highly inconvenient solution but at least you have the option in a theoretical future where Nintendo shuts down the servers.

Oh and some physical games come complete with all the updates, thus not suffering from this issue at all. I found this database of Switch/SW2 cartridges some time ago on reddit. I think it's highly useful for this topic.