Well, it's obviously an intentional bridge. That's how all companies successfully manipulate the masses. You don't want to rock the boat, so you slowly inch your way forward. By doing that, you keep the majority of people asleep and unaware that they are walking toward an unfavorable destination. By the time they actually get there, they're conditioned and believe all is well. It's a standard practice, and game key cards are just another example.

Your kids may do that, but the book industry is still primarily driven by physical books. It's why Books A Million and Barns and Noble are still everywhere and flourishing. And thank God for that.

Platform holders will always want an alternative to buy games next to their e-shops. Sounds weird, but they know legislators will force them to open up their platforms for other e-shops if they hold a monopoly selling games on their platform. See what happened to Apple with the Apple-Epic case. Physical is an alternative. Full physical, key-card, code in a box or whatever.

Sure, but digital is 20% of book sales, which is significant.  By 2029 analytics have the book market being 40% digital.  So it is growing.   

I dont know the stats but gaming, music and shows/movies are dominated by digital.  

For modes younger folks, physical is a foreign concept.  I'm not convinced my kids even know how to use a disc and I don't think they are the odd ones out.

edit

Internet has vinyl at 45 million sold, while CDs were roughly the same at 45 million.  Apple Music has 105 million users, more than physical.  While Spotify has 750 million users, almost 8x the entire physical market by itself.  

I remember back in the early 2000s I built a house and told the builder I didn't want telephone lines in the house.  He told me I was crazy and it would hurt resale value because home phones weren't going anywhere.  Who here has a home phone?  

E-books and Kindles have been a thing for decades now. If young people (or people in general) were going to make the switch in total, the book industry would have collapsed by now. It hasn't. It seems there is something different about the written word. Something tangible that people don't want to give up, and we should all count our blessings for that. Because like you said, everything else has either died off or shrunken down to niche. So it's good to see books carry  the mantel.

that is a fair point I can concede.  Books haven't decline 97% like movies, books are hanging tough.  Even by 2030, physical books are expected to be 50% market share, perhaps a bit more.  

I was going to make a joke about me being in the one percentile, but then I realized I'm still communicating on video game message boards and had a laugh. We're fossils by default, these days. lol

I agree with this theory. Truth to be told even though I went full digital after a year or so on the Switch I'd rather have the choice to have the full game on the cartridge if I wanted to. Then again, you need to install the game and download a multi-gigabyte patch for almost every game on other consoles. Physical is essentially non-existent on PC. I see it as Nintendo losing an edge it had over its competitors ("literally put the cartridge in and you're good to go") rather than having a unique issue.

I am disappointed they're "abusing" it, however, when it was announced I had no quarrels with it because I thought most first party games would be on a normal cartridge and game-key cards would be just a thing for those games that were large enough that they needed that ugly "REMEMBER THE FULL GAME ISN'T ON THE CARTRIDGE" banner. But I kinda get it, with the uncertainty of memory prices from a business standpoint it may seem silly to absorb the cost on physical format instead of just doing what everyone else does anyway (installing, or rather downloading here, the full game on the console) and solving the issue with a small piece of plastic that guarantees you won't lose money over no real benefit (from the PoV of the business of course).

The only real issue that bothers me is the possibility of games not being officially available in any way as time goes on. We don't have a real guarantee that in, let's say, 10 years from now games available for download today will be available to download via GKC then, if you had the full game on the cartridge that wouldn't be a worry at all.

If Nintendo does that... Then they lose me as a customer.
No skin off my nose to be honest.

Difference between console and PC in the digital space is... If you lose access to your games because the service has shut down, then you can get those same games via other avenues.
On console? Not so much.

For example... Almost 30 years ago I bought a game called "StarCraft" on CD-Rom. -And then about 20 years after release, activated my CD key via battle.net digitally.
That same license has transcended multiple form factors, generations and devices.

I can play that same CD-Rom purchase from 30 years ago on the latest and greatest handheld. No piracy.

I'll attest to buying Sins of a Solar Empire in Walmart and then 15 years later emailing the box art and key to Stardock games. They gave me a free Steam license, no questions asked. Not every company will be this nice, but a lot of them are.