Games

It's a neat system. But without the connection and services to back them, they may as well be guaranteed eventual e-waste. Not a problem now, but will be much further down the line.

Decades after release, you can still blast the dust off an old NES and play old cartridges found at flea markets the same way you did with new carts on day 1. How true will this be for the current generation of hardware in the decades to come?

It's just another aspect of forced obsolescence getting foundations put in. They are right to call these digital sales.

On the one hand I agree.

On the other hand, we've moved to a world where digital purchases make sense and games are rarely shipped without patches or later content. We need a better way to manage them. It's silly I have a steam library that I can't resell virtually any part of.

Nintendo's system seems to let users at least do these sorts of license transfers, no? That seems like a win over the digital status quo even if the physical cards aren't what they once were.

Even with Game Key Cards, an actual, physical object has to be produced, at drastically higher marginal cost than what a purely digital license costs in production (basically nothing). And there is a secondary market, which doesn't exist in the digital realm.

Essentially, I don't see the reasoning behind counting them as digital. All the aspects that seem relevant to any publisher (and, to a first approximation, any user that isn't a conservationist) make them identical to physical sales.