While Sony and Xbox move toward a future without discs, Nintendo has made it clear that it does not intend to follow suit in the same direction. Bill van Zyll, vice president and general manager of Nintendo in Latin America, stated in an interview that the company does not plan to abandon physical media, a message arriving amidst the industry’s transition to digital.
“There are no plans to abandon physical”
In a conversation with the Switch-specialized YouTuber known as Coelho, and reported by Nintendo Everything, Van Zyll defended a stance the company describes as agnostic: adapting to what the player prefers at any given moment.
“Historically we have been very agnostic, right? We start from what the consumer prefers and take that into account greatly. Moreover, we just launched a platform. We’ve had the Switch 2 for barely more than a year, which has both digital and physical. There are no plans to abandon physical. We know how much fans like it, so our position has been to be agnostic,” the executive declared.
The message fits the company’s profile, which KitGuru points out makes it the most likely candidate of the three major console manufacturers to renounce physical media support. Nevertheless, hearing it explicitly is valuable: the doubt wasn’t whether Nintendo wanted to continue selling cartridges, but how long it could sustain that bet against the general trend of the sector.
Industry watches discs warily
The context is not coincidental. Sony has already announced it will stop producing physical game discs starting in 2028, and Xbox has taken steps in a similar direction with features like disc-to-digital conversion. That trickle of movements has made the future of physical format one of the recurring debates of this generation.
Amidst that landscape, the Switch 2’s Game-Key Cards remain a pending topic for many players. They are physical cartridges that, in practice, contain barely more than a license to download the game onto the console, rather than the full work recorded on the medium.
However, the difference is not minor for those who buy in stores: although the Game-Key Card does not store the entire game, it does allow reselling the copy or lending it to a friend—two things that a purely digital catalog does not facilitate. That margin of maneuvering is precisely what sustains the value of physical media beyond nostalgia.
What this means for the player
For those who already have a Switch 2 or are thinking about buying one, the news is reassuring in the medium term: the cartridge will remain an option within this generation, at least while the platform remains in its active cycle. Those who prefer physical format to resell, lend, or simply keep their games still have a reason to choose Nintendo’s console over alternatives that are already closing that door.
The fine print is that “there are no plans” does not equate to “never.” The company reserves the margin given by speaking of agnosticism, and the weight of the Game-Key Cards reminds us that the Switch 2’s physical support is no longer exactly what it was in previous generations. As with almost always in this industry, the purchase decision depends less on the medium itself than on the catalog, price, and how much you trust that format will still be alive when the next console arrives.
