Nintendo Says It Has No Plans to Ditch Physical Games - And I Needed to Hear That

I keep a little shoebox of Switch cartridges on the shelf under the TV. It's not a collection, exactly - it's the games my nephew is allowed to pick from when he comes over, and the ones I lend to friends who've just bought a console and don't know where to start. So when a Nintendo executive goes on record saying the company has no plans to ditch physical media, I'm not going to pretend I read it with a straight, neutral face. I read it twice and felt better.

The quote comes from Bill van Zyll, vice president and general manager of Nintendo Latin America, in an interview with the YouTube channel Coelho no Japão (spotted by Nintendo Everything and picked up by Nintendo Life). His reasoning was refreshingly simple: Nintendo knows how much the fans like physical. That's it. No talk of logistics or margins, just an acknowledgement that people want to hold the thing they bought.

Why this lands harder than it normally would

A year ago this would've been a shrug of a story. Nintendo likes cartridges, water is wet. But the ground has shifted. Sony has already confirmed it plans to stop producing PlayStation discs in early 2028, and a lot of people in the industry assume Xbox will drift the same way. That leaves Nintendo as the only one of the big three still planning to keep real games on real cards into the next few years - which is roughly what Circana analyst Mat Piscatella predicted back in July, when he said he expected Nintendo to stay the course regardless of what its rivals do.

And Nintendo's own numbers back up why. In its last fiscal year, a bit over half of its software sales went digital - which, flipped around, means nearly half of everything Nintendo sold was still a box. That's not a niche. That's families buying a game at the supermarket, kids getting one at a birthday, and secondhand shops keeping a whole generation of players fed. For a company whose entire strategy is getting a console into as many living rooms as possible, physical isn't nostalgia - it's a sales channel.

The honest caveats

I don't want to oversell this, so two things. First, van Zyll runs a region, not the company. "No plans" from a regional VP is reassuring, but it isn't a pledge signed by Kyoto, and plans change - it would be a lot more comforting to hear the same sentence from the top. Second, "physical" on Switch 2 already comes with a quiet asterisk: some boxed games ship as game-key cards, where the card is really a licence and the actual game downloads. That isn't the cartridge I keep in the shoebox, and I'd love Nintendo to be just as clear about that distinction as it's being about its commitment to boxes.

Still. On a morning where it feels like the rest of the industry has decided ownership is an optional feature, hearing someone at Nintendo say out loud that they know what fans want - and that they're sticking with it - matters. I'll take the cartridge, thanks. My nephew's got his eye on the shoebox already.

Image: Evan-Amos / Public domain, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nintendo-Switch-Cartridge.jpg