They claim there’s a technical reason instead of a financial one:
"Snowdrop relies heavily on disk streaming for its open world environments, and we found the Switch 2 cards simply didn’t give the performance we needed at the quality target we were going for. I don’t recall the cost of the cards ever entering the discussion - probably because it was moot.
“I think if we’d designed a game for Switch 2 from the ground up it might have been different. As it was, we’d build a game around the SSDs of the initial target platforms, and then the Switch 2 came along a while later. In this case I think our leadership made the right call.”
No explanation was given as to why they didn’t forgo the key card altogether and just release to the eshop only.
TBH compared to digital-only, having a GKC is still a preferrable option, as it can be sold when you’re done with the game.
I think a better option for cases like this would be a cartridge that contains the compressed game data which can be installed to the local storage, as is the case with the other consoles’ disks. But presumably the Switch 2’s OS doesn’t even have that capability right now.
You can’t sell GKC after downloading of the game, as far as I understand the system.
Only benefit I see for key cards are, that you can pay cash instead of needing digital money to get it.
You can sell key cards. The software has to be downloaded, but it’s unplayable without the key card being inserted in the system. Without the key card, you cannot launch the game, but the card itself is not locked to your system. You can loan them or give them away, if you don’t mind losing access to the game the card is for.
Then you don’t understand it correctly. GKCs aren’t locked to an account. When you’re finished with the game you can sell it to someone else and they can download and play the game just fine (as long as the Switch 2 servers are still running). You won’t be able to play it anymore after you’ve sold the card though, as it needs to be inserted to start the game. Source
😃
TIL GKC =/= Download Code
And that is why I was hopeful about GKC before, cause for this use case it’s better than what we had before.
But it seems that many companies who would’ve otherswise released full game on disk have switched to GKC too.