Nintendo’s audacious Nintendo Direct has just finished, and alongside an interesting look at fan favourite Metroid in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, as well as a ten year homecoming for the Tomodachi Life franchise, a possible new industry standard has been revealed in the form of the Virtual Card.
Revealed midway through an already packed Nintendo Direct, this new game sharing system coming in April aims to bring the joy of sharing games between consoles (and seemingly friends and family) through a new experience when purchasing a digital game. Now, each digital game purchased will be added to a separate menu screen, the ‘Virtual Game Cards’ menu. From here, users can do the following:
Load the digital game onto their current system
Load the game onto another system
Lend the game to a Family Member
And to do this, it seems that all that needs to be done is a simple connection via the same wifi connection once, and after such, all future transfers will be able to be done whenever. For the family member option however, this is different. The game is ‘lent’ rather than given over, with a fourteen day limit that when expired, the game returns to the original user.
This form of gamesharing actively being endorsed by such a large company like Nintendo is fantastic to see, and brings on the question, what does this mean for the industry as a whole?
The short answer, probably nothing much. Sony introduced ‘Console Sharing’ with the PS5, which itself provides the similar function of allowing digital games to be shared across two consoles, the biggest difference here is Nintendo’s adamant approach for stating more than this number can be shared too (though only one game at a time).
Xbox too has a similar feature. Any ‘home’ xbox profile can be loaded onto any xbox within that household, and as such games and more importantly even gamepass can be shared with those in your home. That seems to be the caveat here however. Your home. No sharing with friends across the country unless they come to visit. Perhaps Nintendo’s new way of handling digital game sharing will spark a development into it to allow this kind of support. For the time being however, this is a big win for Nintendo Switch owners, but an overall mild thumbs up in the grand scheme of the industry.