So I realized yesterday that you can match your GKC game with a local version. That means even if the servers go down a GKC could potentially be used with a friend's Switch 2 to download the game. Your friend just needs to have that GKC game on their harddrive. Regular Switch 1 carts are supposed to only last 20 years. But then again, VHS was supposed to only last 25 years. And early DS carts should have died by now too but a majority of them still work. 

Anyway, even after the servers go down and all proper physical cards die to memory rot you might be able to still activate a GKC if you can find someone with a working Switch 2 that already has said game downloaded. 

I'll still avoid GKC and only buy one every three or four years though. 

If you have a friend with game already downloaded then you can just play the game. You don’t need the GKC.

GKC won't have that much more shelflife than a full cart. The only real difference between them is that the GKC will have a tiny capacity, likely in the megabytes, compared to the up to 64gb carts.

The smaller NAND capacity might reduce risk of failure but when we're talking about the cartridges expiring due to age it's not going to be a dramatic difference.

Essentially it is just a cartridge with a very low storage limit.

…I was saying this several months ago, but ended up at war with like half the community. Funny these things work out in the end. Same thing with the nonsense line that Switch 2 “has no games”.

The issue with gaming preservation in consoles is not servers, not the media. It's the consoles themselves

Once your console stop working you lose your collection, period

Backwards compatibility stends the life of a library, but there is a cap

Emulation is the only way to keep games alive. DRM free digital games is the way

switch 1 carts are supposed to last 20 years? ive never heard of this

You would be blown away at the lengths people in the retro gaming hobby go to keep older consoles alive. We shouldn't have working PS3s in 2040 yet we will because mad scientists reball and liquid cool PS3 fats.

This will never be a solution. Not scalable. At best some games will be available to play for a few enthusiasts

True but unless we get an FPGA version of every console it's never going to be an exact 1:1 recreation. Tons of games on emulators these days are full of bugs. People just don't notice them. 

I would rather try to be in that small subsection of people that kept their hardware alive than rely on software emulators. 

I do think GKC and digital copies are a far bigger threat to game preservation than physical copies deteriorating. 

Neither GKC nor digital media are a threats to game preservation in any form. The threats to game preservation are the absurdly high duration of intelectual property (almost 70 years after publishing to get in public domain is ABSURD, should be 30 to 40 at best) and the DRMs tied to service accounts