The recent Nintendo Direct had a lot more in store for us than just exciting new game trailers and release dates, because the Japanese gaming giant is taking a look back at the old school and introducing Virtual Game Cards, making digital libraries as freely available as all of your physical copies. In a gaming landscape where most titles are acquired digitally, the days of trading your discs and cards with friends feel woefully over.
Well, Nintendo said ‘not anymore’ to that. Virtual Game Cards do exactly what they say on the tin and transform your digital game library into a swappable, tradeable collection. That means that some of the best Switch games will become immediately available to you, completely free, provided you have a friend to borrow from, of course.
The Virtual Game Cards will have their own management screen, where you can load, eject, and manage the games you can play between two consoles. To swap with friends, you only need to sync and connect your Switches for the first time, after which you’ll be able to trade games whenever you please.
You can also upload your Virtual Game Cards to your Nintendo family group account and share them just as freely. Using the same sync process, you just need to connect your consoles once and then you can start loaning your games out. Plus, you won’t have to worry about bugging your little brother for your copy of Mario Kart 8 back, because any game you loan out as a Virtual Game Card will automatically return to your library after a two-week period.
You can only loan one game out at a time per friend, so you won’t have to worry too much about suddenly losing all of your favorite titles, and people can’t just rummage through your library at will and cherry-pick games. So you won’t have to panic at your copy of the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild suddenly going missing.
Nintendo is bringing Virtual Game Cards to both the standard Switch and the Switch 2 next April, and we’re already planning how we’re going to organize our libraries. If you need some new names to put on the roster, take a look at our picks for the best action games on the Switch, and check out when the Pokémon Legends Z-A release date is coming to make a space for it!