How Nintendo’s innovative Switch digital game sharing works

Ahead of the Switch 2 launch, Nintendo has announced a clever system designed to make sharing digital games a bit more like sharing physical ones.

Sort of, anyway. It’s coming to the current Switch and the Switch 2. Here’s how it works.

It all starts when you buy a digital game, which unlocks a virtual game card on your system. But there are two ways to share this virtual game card between Switch consoles.

There’s sharing you can do between just two specific consoles — we can picture this appealing for households who end up with both an original Switch and a Switch 2. And then there’s family/household sharing for those true multi-Switch houses with a bunch of consoles.

Let’s start with the first kind. This new system, launching in "late April", will let you effectively swap a digital game between two Switch systems.

You’ll “eject” it from the initial one, and send it to the second. Once that’s done you won’t be able to play the game on the first Switch. But you can play it on the second — and this bit is important — without needing to be online after the swap.

The initial procedure does require the two consoles to be in local proximity. No sharing across continents.

Switch 2: Family game sharing

If you want to be able to share between more than two Switch consoles, the system works similarly, but there are some differences.

Up to eight consoles can be linked as part of a family group, but there are some more obvious limits. Game transfers only last for two weeks, similar to a library book loan, and one of these consoles can only have one of these borrowed games active at a time.

It is more of a headache to understand than it probably should be? Absolutely. But we can also understand Nintendo wanting to keep tight reins on this one as people are going to ride it for all it’s worth. Well, the folks who can get their heads around how it works, anyway.

It will all be managed through a visual interface that shows where your virtual game cards are. And with any luck that’ll be more intuitive than our description of the feature.

This one could be pretty useful if what we’re hoping for happens, that the Nintendo Switch 2 gets a whole stack of free next-gen updates for Switch games we already own — ones we can transfer between hardware generations with this system.

After all, if Nintendo wants its fans to get more comfortable with buying digital, making them regret not buying a cartridge is a pretty good place to start.

The Switch 2’s big unveil happens on April 2nd. And while we may not hear more about game sharing then, we expect to hear the console’s price, release date, and about its initial game library.

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