Nintendo Has 'No Plans to Ditch Physical' Games - News
by William D'Angelo , posted 7 hours ago / 763 Views
The vice president and general manager for Nintendo in Latin America Bill van Zyll in an interview with Coelho said Nintendo has no plans to stop selling physical games as he knows how much fans like the format.
"Historically, we've been very agnostic, right? We go off what the consumer prefers, and take that into account very heavily," said Zyll.
"We also have a platform that was just launched. We’re barely just over a year into NS2. It’s got both digital and physical – that capability. There’s no plans to ditch physical. We know how much the fans like it as well, so our position has been to be agnostic."
PlayStation will be ending the release of new physical game discs in January 2028. Starting in January 2028, all new games release on PlayStation consoles on the PlayStation Store and at retailers will be in digital formats only.
Thanks, NintendoEverything.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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no plans to ditch physical, until we eventually ditch it of course
I mean that's the consumer to decide after all. If they dip at 10% physical to 90% digital ratio at the end of the gen, i would understand the change since it just cost a lot less money. But i don't think it will be the case, especially since Nintendo has a big physical collector fanbase.
Excellent point.
correct, and im one of them
Yes, GKC will perhaps be their interpretation of physical media with their next console.
I would assume they would drop it all together next generation.
That could be seven years away though. Nothing set in stone yet.
That could also be true.
Yeah, it would likely be just as accurate to say that they have no plans to keep physical games. The important part being that they currently have no plans at all.
Well yeah because it'd be more expensive for them to put in enough built-in storage for the game sizes these days than it is to keep the physical hardware slots in the system and ship games. But as we see with S2, GKC muddy the waters when most physical games on the system are just digital masquerading as physical. As Wman1996 said in their comment "physical with annoyances".
It's tough to put the genie back in the bottle when annoyances start.
A good amount of PS5 and Series X discs require online downloads just to play instead of putting the game on 2 discs. That right there was a warning sign that discs wouldn't come out forever for consoles.
Xbox and PlayStation just expect customers to deal with it, so the publishers aren't going to start making more 2 and 3 disc games. And as we know, new disc titles on PS5 are ending in 2028.
They are keeping physical with annoyances. Game Key Cards for many physical games (barely a physical copy) and some Nintendo physical games are $10 more than their eShop version. A more ethical version of that would be $49.99 for OOT and $59.99 for the physical. Use the physical as the baseline price and the digital as cheaper. Not the digital as the baseline and physical more expensive.
The baseline price is 70$, we liking it or not. And I would rather have the option to spend 10$ more than simply have to buy iti digital.
The problem is in their mind key cards are 'physical games'.
