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NEWS: Pokémon Pokopia Life Sim Game Launches on March 5, 2026

Is interesting seeing how many Nintendo spaces are noting a backlash this morning regarding the Game Key announcement for this particular title, I'm hoping Nintendo is eventually pressured to walk support back for them, but I'm not holding my breath.

In any case GKCs have been around for five months now, if they were really tanking sales to the point publishers cared then Nintendo wouldn't be publishing a Pokemon spinoff game for them using and would require in the contract that's it's on full carts. It's also really telling that Capcom is going all in on GKC special editions for Resident Evil. Despite how many tests there have been where people said the backlash is working they clearly have faith in the format and it isn't going anywhere.

Or it's a sign of companies doubling down because they WANT them to be a thing despite consumers hating them.

AiddonValentine wrote:

Or it's a sign of companies doubling down because they WANT them to be a thing despite consumers hating them.

Pretty much just like them trying to incorporate AI into workflows only for like 90% of them to actually hinder performance rather than improve it.

Pokenatic wrote:

AiddonValentine wrote: Or it's a sign of companies doubling down because they WANT them to be a thing despite consumers hating them. Pretty much just like them trying to incorporate AI into workflows only for like 90% of them to actually hinder performance rather than improve it.

Ding ding ding, often when presented with data of "uh yeah, this has been a complete bust" a lot of the time people will double down because hearing "you were wrong" is a huge blow to their egos. It's why NFTs were a thing and a lot of bandwagon chasers were caught holding the bag on gigantic money sinks

I don't buy the environmental argument there because physical games already generate 100x more carbon than digital

The environmental argument isn’t that game key cards are worse than physical carts, but that they’re worse than digital codes.

They’re spending all this money manufacturing and shipping game key carts, which are little more than download cards arbitrarily tied to a worthless hunk of plastic. That this is several orders of magnitude worse for the environment than the alternative is pretty self-evident.

No one ever mentioned any environmental angle. Even bringing that up is kind of like saying "Don't you know making books actually kills trees???" which isn't the point. The point is that key cards aren't for the sake of consumers or developers, they were clearly made to placate c-suite people and shareholders who want an all digital environment where nobody actually owns their games and they want to penny pinch on compression and optimization because they don't want to pay people to do that. Then there's how they're bad for preservation which makes them even worse.

Yes, actual physical copies of games have a similar (technically greater, but we don’t need to go into that) environmental impact, but that’s really not relevant when we’re talking specifically about digital games.
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I would say framing game key carts solely against physical carts is pretty disingenuous as doing so occludes the many problems game key carts inherently possess.

PostPosted: 12 Nov 2025 07:01 Post subject:
I don’t think you quite understand what a false equivalency is. Anyway, I’ll try to explain this as clearly as I can.

(Wish me luck.)

So, essentially, this is really a very simple issue. There are only two ways to buy video games: physically or digitally. Game key cards are digital copies of games that come with a lot of waste that has a very detrimental impact on the environment —. It just in the manufacture of the plastic, or the printing of the ink, but in the diesel and jet-fuel and human labor required to distribute what are, in effect, placebo games, worldwide.

Yes, actual physical copies of games have a similar (technically greater, but we don’t need to go into that) environmental impact, but that’s really not relevant when we’re talking specifically about digital games.

The great benefit of which has always been that they’re far more profitable for publishers and developers (no manufacturing costs! No distribution costs!), far more convenient (arguably) for consumers, and better for the environment. As the name “Game key cart” indicates, the thing of value here is the game key — literally just a string of numbers, entitling whoever possesses the key to a digital copy of a game. That’s not something that really warrants, requires or benefits from any more words than just those first two.

I would say framing game key carts solely against physical carts is pretty disingenuous as doing so occludes the many problems game key carts inherently possess.

I also think it’s weird to frame the act of buying physical games as merely an empty exercise in procuring a hunk of plastic to sit on a shelf, forever untouched. Like, call me radical or whatever, but I’m pretty confident in saying that the vast majority of people who buy video games do so in order to play video games.

And if that were the case, game key carts would still be overwhelming worse for everyone than consumers simply buying some generic cases online and printing their own covers for them. After all, if the actual game is irrelevant, why spend even more money on a digital code? The plastic by itself is far cheaper.

And that’s even without getting into the potentially fatal damage game key cards will do to consumer confidence in NS2 games, or the fact that they cost developers/publishers more while offering no real benefit to consumers.

EDIT: Further, I’d add that Nintendo (and every other publisher trying to take advantage of game key carts) has had months to come up with a compelling argument for why they should exist, for how they might benefit consumers or publishers. Not only have they failed to do so, for the most part they haven’t even really tried. That ought to tell ya’ something.

I have literally never heard of studios or people being harassed in this case. If anything it's clearly people knowing their bosses won't like key cards flopping and are trying to manufacture consent. It's like with day one passes and whatnot during the 7th gen, it's just the latest scheme c-suite idiots cook up because they think it'll increase profits until the actual data comes back and says "nope, if anything it decreases profits." Meanwhile, Nintendo doesn't mess with them which kinda gives away the whole thing.