I would really love to go all digital with Switch. It is very convenient. Switching from one game to another so easily. Not messing with shipping boxes or having the bother of going to a store. I very rarely sell my games so that isn't a concern for me. We are being pushed more and more towards digital games, with so many games having updates and dlc content only available digitally. And with a ridiculous new practice where you release a physical game that won't even play without a downloaded update (nice; it's the worst of both worlds) it seems the days of physical releases are numbered.
I've been digital with music for awhile now. But I trust that Amazon will be there, granting me access to my music for the rest of my life. And if they do close the doors at Amazon before then, I can download my music as mp3 files that I can play on whatever device I want and back them up however I want.
I've even been buying digital video games for some time. I use sites like GOG, itch.io, and Humble Bundle who have great pro customer policies. The games I buy are mine and they are DRM free. I can download the game and back it up and be reasonably sure I will have access to it in the future. No less reasonable than if I had purchased the game on a physical disc or cartridge. Actually it is even more reasonable because I can have redundant backups in multiple locations. What a wonderful digital policy for customers.
I have been sorely disappointed in Nintendo's anti customer policies though. The only digital games I bought on Wii U or 3ds were games priced so low that I felt like if I someday lost access to it I could feel OK about considering it a rental.
Their policy with Wii U was that the games were not tied to your account but rather to your system. So if something happened to your Wii U you couldn't just buy another Wii U, log in, and redownload your games. You couldn't just back up your games to a harddrive and connect that to a Wii U and play them. Could you get them back at all? I don't know. I asked Nintendo about this once and they said to contact them if that ever happened. They made it clear there was no promise that I could get my games back. I guess the official policy is to call them up and beg for help and see what happens, hoping for mercy. Sorry but that doesn't work for me.
As I look at the large library I have built of DS, Wii, 3DS, and Wii U games I think about how awful it would be to build up a large library of Switch games and then someday lose access to them all. The entire library, straight to hell. Nintendo has already announced they are shutting down the Wii eshop. What was that 12 years? With no way to back up the games, will there come a time where you cannot redownload them if you need to? Who knows? Nintendo won't say.
I'm sorry but you have to do better than that if you want me to build a library of digital games on Switch. I need more transparency about how you are going to handle these very real situations. I have to wonder if Nintendo even knows what they will do. I don't think they have thought it through. If these games come with an expiration date we need to know it now.
