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When do I have to watch out for mandatory downloads?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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Also note, @worhui@lemmy.world, this labelling is only a Switch 2 thing. I believe it's up to the developer how they want to give the warning on Switch 1 cases, if they even need to at all (either way, the labelling varies game-by-game on Switch 1). But for Switch 2 games, it's a requirement, and is always at the bottom of the game art.
Edit: Overhauled 2nd sentence to clear up potential misunderstanding.
Game Key Cards don't exist on Switch 1, those are all full cartridges.
I know that. I wasn't saying they do. But download-only Switch 1 carts do exist, and what I am saying is that there is no requirement for third-parties to label games a certain way on Switch 1 when making the customer aware of the download. On the Switch 2, if it's a game key card, it has to be labelled the exact same way on every single game at the bottom of the art no matter what, while on Switch 1, how these games are labelled varies from game-to-game, probably due to publishers varying preferences. On Switch 2 it's all standardised.
What Switch 1 cart is download-only? The closest thing I know of are some compilations like Final Fantasy X/X-2, which does have X on the cart but then gives you a download code for X-2. And even that is labeled on the box.
Hogwarts Legacy is one example. It only contains a very small portion of the game on cartridge (The tutorial area). The rest you have to download.
There were lots of other games that did this, I've seen plenty of games like this on store shelves, but I just can't recall any more specific examples at the top of my head, since I usually just mentally ignored the existence of any Switch games when they weren't released properly on cart.
More often then not, download-required games were just a download code with no cart, but there are quite a handful of games that released as a cartridge that basically acted like a key. I don't know if they differed at all in functionality to the Switch 2's key cards because I never bought one to test, but I believe it seems to work practically identically to the Switch 2's Game-key cards.