One Nintendo executive has said that the company has absolutely no plans to ditch physical games after PlayStation confirmed it was scrapping discs from early 2028.
Back in July, Sony announced it would stop making physical PlayStation games after January 2028 due to “consumer trends”. One report claimed that just seven PlayStation games have sold more than 100,000 physical copies in the US this year.
The move has been criticised by gaming fans and industry experts but a planned boycott of PlayStation was reported to have “no measurable impact”.
Following the announcement, Microsoft has launched a new physical-to-digital scheme that allows players to turn their existing physical games into digital versions at no extra cost. Over the weekend, a Nintendo executive confirmed that Switch 2 games will continue to be released on physical cartridges too, despite rising production costs.
“We go off what the consumer prefers, and take that into account very heavily,” general manager for Nintendo Latin America Bill van Zyll told Brazilian content creator Coelho no Japão.“We also have a platform that was just launched. We’re barely just over a year into the Nintendo Switch 2. It’s got both digital and physical capability. There’s no plans to ditch physical. We know how much the fans like it as well.”
Earlier this year, Nintendo announced that it would start selling physical and digital games at a different price. “Nintendo games offer the same experiences whether in packaged or digital format, and this change simply reflects the different costs associated with producing and distributing each format and offers players more choice in how they can buy and play Nintendo games,” they explained in a press release.
Shortly afterwards, Nintendo released a second statement that hit back at claims this was a quiet price hike for physical games. “The cost of physical games is not going up,” they said. “This means that when Nintendo sells digital versions of Nintendo published games exclusive to Nintendo Switch 2 to consumers in the U.S., those prices will have an MSRP that is lower than their physical counterparts.”
