FF7 Remake trilogy director wants us to accept Game-Key Cards, and yeah, no.

Speaking in a recent interview, FF7 Remake director Naoki Hamaguchi defended the concept of Game-Key Cards, digital substitutions for physical cartridges on the Switch 2, expressing his desire to see fans accept this new tech since there are good reasons for it. And, yeah, I’m not convinced.

As per IGN, Hamaguchi spoke in favor of Game-Key Cards, a type of digital substitution for physical cards, which are slotted into the Switch 2 but carry no data, instead only containing the code for any given game, which is then downloaded from Nintendo’s servers. It is only one of many formats replacing what was formerly physical, preserving only the aesthetic aspect of the card itself, but not its internal hardware.

Hamaguchi believes there is a perfectly valid reason for switching to Game-Key Cards, which isn’t baseless. “I really get where people are coming from in terms of their negativity towards it,” Hamaguchi said, but added that physical cards are much slower and have limited storage, severely impacting how much content developers can fit onto them and how they perform.

With digital cards, these issues are nonexistent, as Switch 2’s hardware is faster and can handle bigger games without being limited by game cards.

It is the reason why Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade will launch on the Switch 2 only as a Game-Key Card, and not a physical one.

He expressed the desire to see Nintendo fans embrace this novel concept, and “maybe come to accept them as part of the culture of gaming on Switch,” since it allows developers a way to circumvent hardware limitations and allows them to “do things that maybe we wouldn’t otherwise.”

These are certainly compelling arguments, and would be applicable if we didn’t have physical discs and games already that are massive and work fantastically with modern readers. Various PlayStation 5 games, big and small, can be purchased and played on disc, with the console’s reader handling the loading times quite well.

It is Nintendo’s fault for not innovating or trying to improve the physical card concept, akin to how Sony has expanded and utilized the Blu-Ray technology for its consoles since the PS3. Hell, Sony sacrificed a lot with that generation by pushing for Blu-Ray, and look where they are now. Sometimes bold, costly decisions end up working out to the joy of everyone, and especially the players.

To this day, 20 years later, you can still purchase physical copies of PS3 games and play them as they were on launch. Untouched, uncorrupted, for better or worse. Those games are preserved for all time and cannot be rug-pulled at the whim of a publisher one day when Nintendo shuts down its Switch 2 servers and decides it does not want to shill out the bandwidth for you to download your digital card’s “content.”

I understand digitalization has provided us with options we could only have dreamed of a couple of decades ago, but it is by no means a substitute for physical media, whose preservation is never brought into question. Nintendo does allow re-selling and second-hand copies of Game-Key Cards, which is an immensely good decision on their part, but it still imprisons those copies within the online-only Nintendo ecosystem that you can never escape.

With a physical copy, the entirety of the game written to it, you can fire up your base PS3 that’s never been updated and load in a game that’s also never seen an online connection, and it’d still work. The same likely won’t be able to be said about these digitalized alternatives, that are bound to one day fizzle out into the virtual void where they already dwell.

Instead of innovation, companies choose convenience, and it’s an unfortunate reality we live in, but not one we’re so eager to accept. So no, despite the noble intentions, I don’t want to embrace Game-Key Cards.

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