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Ashes to ashes How long will Switch 2’s Game Key Cards keep working? Nintendo's history suggests we can look forward to decades of support. Kyle Orland – May 6, 2025 12:22 pm | 33 A legitimate photo of a landfill, taken by a time traveler from the future. Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images A legitimate photo of a landfill, taken by a time traveler from the future. Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Minimize to nav Last month, Nintendo and its third-party partners revealed that many of the "physical" games on the Switch 2 would be made available only as "Digital Key Cards." Unlike traditional physical Switch games—which contain flash memory with the necessary data to play the game on the card itself—these key cards will simply enable the holder to download a copy of the game to their system and play that copy if and when the transferable key card is inserted in the system. Already, many players are thinking ahead to what this means for their ability to play Game Key Card releases well into the future. It's not hard to find potential Switch 2 owners publicly worrying about games "disappear[ing] into the void" or becoming "effectively a worthless piece of plastic/e-waste" when Nintendo eventually disables its Switch 2 game download servers. Some go even farther, calling a Game Key Card an "eighty dollar rental" rather than a real game purchase. While these are valid long-term concerns, I think some players are underestimating the likely timeline for when Game Key Cards will become "useless e-waste." As it stands, we already have an example of Nintendo supporting continued downloads of games purchased nearly two decades ago and counting. The enduring Virtual Console When Nintendo launched the Wii in November 2006, it also launched the Wii Virtual Console with 30 downloadable titles ranging from Super Mario 64 to Urban Champion. And it may surprise you to learn that Virtual Console purchases made the day the Wii launched can still be redownloaded from Nintendo's servers to this day. I know it surprised me when I read about it in various forum threads in recent weeks. I've been writing about the shutdown of the Wii's various online services for years, not to mention the high-profile shutdown of the 3DS and Wii U eShops in 2023. By now, I figured that Nintendo had pulled the final plug on whatever aging server was letting Wii Virtual Console (and WiiWare) downloads limp along. That 1980s NES game you purchased on the Wii in 2006 can still be downloaded in 2025! Credit: YouTube / GameMasterMike08 That 1980s NES game you purchased on the Wii in 2006 can still be downloaded in 2025! Credit: YouTube / GameMasterMike08 True, Nintendo shut off new downloadable game purchases on the Wii in 2019, likely to avoid the financial and customer support hassles of providing payment services for a vanishingly small market of players still actively buying games on the Wii. But when it comes to downloading old purchases, the company's official support site still says that "as long as you are using the same Wii console you used to originally download the game, you will be able to re-download it should the game be lost or deleted." Sure enough, just yesterday, I was able to plug in my aging Wii U, flip over to Wii mode (which still contains my recovered and transferred Virtual Console games licenses) and download fresh copies of games like Actraiser and Bonk's Adventure like it was still 2006 (the same goes for redownloading previous Wii U and 3DS game purchases on those consoles, by the way). When it comes to the longevity of a downloadable purchase, Nintendo now comes close to rivaling Steam, where players can still redownload the copy of Half-Life 2 they purchased over 20 years ago. And while those Wii downloads are frustratingly tied to the original hardware used to make the purchase, the Switch 2's Game Key Cards ensure any future downloads will be easily portable to different hardware units. Past performance, future results Keep in mind, too, that Nintendo has kept the game download servers for the Wii active even though it hasn't sold any new downloadable Wii games for roughly six years. At this point, any server hardware and bandwidth Nintendo is using to support Wii downloads is nothing but a financial loss for the company (unlike Steam, where Valve is at least still selling fresh copies of Half-Life 2 to new generations of PC gamers). The fact that Nintendo is still willing to provide those downloads with no direct financial upside suggests good things about its future commitment to Game Key Cards. You could even argue that Nintendo is more likely to offer longer-term support for Game Key Card downloads since backward compatibility seems to be a priority for the Switch hardware line. If we presume that future Switch systems will remain backward compatible, we can probably also presume that Nintendo will want players on new hardware to still have access to their old Game Key Card purchases (or to be able to use Game Key Cards purchased on the secondhand market). A pile of physical games that will never require a download server to work. Credit: Aurich Lawson A pile of physical games that will never require a download server to work. Credit: Aurich Lawson There are no guarantees in life, of course, and nothing lasts forever. Nintendo will one day go out of business, at which point it seems unlikely that a Game Key Card will be able to download much of anything. Short of that, Nintendo could suffer a financial malady that makes download servers for legacy systems seem like an indulgence, or it could come under new management that doesn't see value in supporting decades-old purchases made for ancient consoles. As of this writing, though, Nintendo has kept its Wii game download servers active for 6,743 days and counting. If the Switch 2 Game Key Card servers last as long, that means those cards will still be fully functional through at least October 2043. I don't know what I will be doing with my life in 2043, but it's comforting and extremely plausible to imagine that the "eighty dollar rental" I made of a Switch 2 Game Key Card back in 2025 will still work as intended. Or, to put it another way, I think it's highly likely that I will become "e-waste" long before any Switch 2 Game Key Cards. Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. 33 Comments