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Nintendo clarifies Zelda: Breath of the Wild's Switch 2 Edition doesn't include its paid DLC
(www.eurogamer.net)
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Hm. That's an interesting approach to it, but I think it's probably too black and white.
I mean, yeah, sure, for complete preservation you need archival and version control. I'll honestly say that's only legitimately doable on the dev side. You get into preserving the code and the assets there, too.
But on the user end I'd say that any version that is physically stored and can run offline, be it a DRM-free installable GOG-style or a physical piece of media storing a build of the game is much, much better than a DRMd all-digital release.
Even if it hadn't been pirateable day one, BotW would live on. Not only are there multiple cart versions with multiple patches of the game, including the Switch 2 upgrade, but all those versions will run on all consoles. It won't be the most up to date version of the game, but it'll be playable, and that's already a lot compared to the baseline we're setting elsewhere. It's certainly not a "glorified DRM key".
But that's at the top end of sustainability for physical media. The Switch 1 has some carts that don't include full playable builds and need partial downloads to run properly. That's a different scenario. If a game needs online auth to unlock the media that's another scenario. Obviously for online only games the cart IS in fact just an access point. And on Switch 2 there will be carts that act as physical keys only.
But not all of those are created equal. I think acknowledging the differences is important. If nothing else to ensure people are educated about the difference between owning BotW in a cart they will get to play indefinitely versus Street Fighter 6 in a cart that won't work if the servers are down and they don't have an installed version stored.
Thankfully the Switch 1 was cracked day 1 so the preservation can got kicked down the road to the Switch 2 release. Look up what speedrunners have to do to get the optimal any% patch for Pokémon BDSP legitimately
Oh, come on, speedrunners cherrypicking patches is hardly the litmus test for preservation.
The Switch is easily the most preservation-friendly console platform of its generation, even if it is unfortunately by default. It has also turned out to be the most officially preservation-friendly Nintendo platform in a good long while, if only because its unexpected success forced a robust backwards compatibility scheme, which in turn forces server compatibility and likely longer support than anything else since the DSi got.
Am I happy about that state of affairs? Not really. Am I grading on a curve at this point? I sure am. It's not a black and white thing.
And for the record, that's not a defense of Nintendo as a company, but there's a lot of willingness to misrepresent how the actual proposition on the Switch 2 works, and I find that frustrating. I will take a beligerent company putting all its eggs on the basket of a physical-friendly backwards compatible platform over Microsoft's "your toaster is an Xbox" cloud-driven nonesense any day. Catch me on a good day, I'll take it over Steam's "remember you don't actually own anything" store warning sticker.
Preserving the shit very few people care about is absolutely a more important thing than preserving the popular thing. BOTW's latest version will never disappear, neither will Mario 64, but the most ephemeral media in the modern landscape is always interstitial versions. You might be able to find the first cut of Star Wars before it was "A New Hope", but what about all those recuts and edits that happened between the original release and whatever the latest CGI-filled release is? you might not care about watching the "worst" version of Star Wars, but the definition of "niche" is "most people don't care". A speedrun glitch that existed for a week (without being pressed to the cartridge, even!) before being patched is absolutely something worth preserving, because unlike Ocarina of Time it's actually in danger of being lost (and would be lost almost certainly if the Switch wasn't hacked. You had to have the game for that week and then permanently leave an entire console offline to keep it)
You think this is a more antagonistic conversation than it is. I absolutely agree preservation isn't about the ten big games that mass audiences (or big speedrunning communities) care about.
But, again, we're grading on a curve on the user side and for the real silver bullet for full preservation you need publishers and public organizations instead. As a user I want access to physical media that runs offline and stand-alone (or DRM-free digital copies). For actual preservation I want it to be mandatory to deposit a public copy of both client and server code in some public organization and for studios to have at least a best practice to keep fully version historied archives of both code and assets.
But even on the consumer side, if I'm going to be frustrated at someone it's going to be to the worst offenders, and from what we know of it at launch, and from this angle the Switch 2 is far from that.
What I'm antagonistic towards is console manufacturers selling incomplete games on their DRM boxes.
Nintendo's the good side of the curve? Nintendo shut down the 3ds and wii u eshops when the console was half a generation out of date. If we lived in a world with no piracy and no emulation (and no buying secondhand consoles with paid DLC installed, because that's against TOS), and I threw my PS4 and Wii U into a wood chipper, I'd be one used PS4 away from playing my digital or disc copy of Bloodborne complete with the Old Hunters DLC. I don't even have to buy it again because Sony is sane and ties purchases to an account instead of a console. Meanwhile on the Nintendo side, I'm never gonna play as Cloud in Smash 4 again, with or without my disc.
How about the situation where Nintendo and Sony both stop operating CDNs for old consoles? In that case, they're equal at worst - I can play stuff I have installed until the console breaks, same with discs/carts. If the console breaks post-CDN apocalypse, and I buy a new one that can't access game updates, I'm stuck with infinite loading screens in Bloodborne and whatever the heck v1.0 of Mario Kart 8 was. Rhythm Heaven Megamix was never released physically in the US, and the 3DS is region locked, so if you want to get your hands on that, up yours I guess. Wanna experience the weirdest port of The Binding of Isaac to ever exist? Nope.
Nintendo released a limited run digital purchase (Mario 3D All-Stars), for Christ's sake! What's MS or Sony done that's even close to that? Pulled a free trailer for a canceled horror game? I can still buy PS3 games on Sony's store if I want to. On the PlayStation 3! From 2006!
Nintendo, MS, and Sony do not deserve any grace when it comes to this topic. They're all bad. It's just easier to overlook how bad Nintendo's preservation of digital content (including significant portions of games that also got carts) is when it takes half an hour to hack a 3DS, Wii U, or launch model Switch.
I am very confused now.
So you're okay with DRMd digital purchases as long as they keep the servers up? But you're angry that indefinitely working cartridges don't include patches and DLC in the cart? Even though ultimately the content not included in the cart is literally delivered the same way as the digital purchases?
What?
I mean, what?
I would get it as a user preference thing, in terms of what you prefer right now or what's convenient to you right now, but from the long term preservation angle it is the physical release that takes it every time, patches or no patches, DLC or no DLC. Absolutely every current system is flawed and absolutely jailbreaking and piracy are needed for full preservation as the system currently works, but in what world is a company arbitrarily choosing to keep servers going a better solution than standalone physical versions?
You are extremely opinionated about this in a very inconsistent way and it's just so confusing.
Physical games aren't the whole game anymore and haven't been for over a decade, is the main thesis. A DRM-locked (encryption and copy protection on the cart/disc are also DRM) physical copy that needs DRM-locked downloads to be complete is equal in preservation weight to a DRM-locked fully digital game. Once both releases are DRM-locked and download-reliant, I do consider the DRM-locked download that's still acquirable 10 years later to be better than the one that isn't. Both are shit, but like you said - spectrum. Disregarding piracy, The Old Hunters is better preserved than Champion's Ballad (Wii U).
Meanwhile outside of console land, DRM-free digital exists. That's the holy grail gold standard, not 60% of pokemon sword on a flash drive. DRM-free digital survives the CDN end-of-lifing. It survives my PC exploding, because unlike even complete physical games like a SNES cart, I can copy my DRM-free digital installer to as many devices as I want. DRM-free digital installs the version of the game I downloaded, without any connection to the internet. DRM-free digital survives the music license for a David Bowie track expiring. Even if every physical console release eventually got the "final cut GOTY" disc with everything on it, it's worse than DRM-free digital by virtue of being a physically destructible copy (though I do consider physical a relevant form of preservation for all the patchless console gens). Everything less than DRM-free (or DRM-stripped) digital is ephemeral. PC is the only platform that's DRM-free by default, and fully abandoning physical copies a decade ago didn't change a thing for preservation.
Consoles will never give us DRM-free digital, because the only reason consoles exist now is to be DRM. So the only relevant preservation of console games is dumping and cracking and emulating, because that makes them DRM-free digital, even though they're not legally such.
No, it is not equivalent. A full build in a cartridge is playable beginning to end. It may be missing bug fixes, tuning changes or expansions, but it is a full game.
The Switch in particular has games that look physical but aren't, and nobody should consider those physical releases, but physical games that actually are physical games aren't equivalent to digital releases just because there is additional content that is digital-only. You lose me there, that premise is just incorrect. And even if it wasn't, preserving the 1.0 vanilla version of a game is as relevant as preserving the all-bells-and-whistles last patch with all DLC. Ultimately for full archival purposes both are relevant, so I'd rather have one of those frozen in carbonite than neither.
Now, I agree that DRM-free releases are a better way to handle this than DRMd releases, and I do agree that jailbreaking and backing up digital copies of DRMd releases is crucial for preservation.
But that is neither here nor there. For practical usage, as a sustainable artefact and as a preservable snapshot of a media release a physical version is absolutely crucial.