If you still like a game you can hold, lend to a friend, or put on a shelf, Nintendo just gave you a reason to relax — at least for this console generation.
Speaking at the Brasil Game Show in an interview with Brazilian creator Rodrigo Coelho, Bill van Zyll, vice president and general manager for Nintendo Latin America, said the company has no plans to abandon physical releases. Reports of the interview spread across gaming outlets on October 12 and 13.
Van Zyll described Nintendo's position as deliberately neutral. The company, he explained, pays close attention to what players actually prefer, and then follows that preference. The Switch 2, now a little over a year old, was built to support both downloads and physical cartridges, and he stressed that fans value having the choice.
The timing is what made the comments land. Sony confirmed earlier this year that it will stop producing PlayStation discs in January 2028, after which new releases would arrive digitally, with retail boxes carrying download codes instead of discs. The decision drew sharp criticism from collectors and preservation advocates, who worry about what happens to a library when servers, licences, or stores disappear.
Xbox, by contrast, has stayed comparatively quiet about its own long-term plans for physical media, leaving Nintendo as the most vocal defender of the format among the three major platform holders — even if its defence comes with a caveat.
That caveat matters. Van Zyll did not promise physical games forever. An agnostic stance cuts both ways: if buying habits shift decisively toward downloads, Nintendo could revisit the question. For now, though, the numbers and the feedback the company is seeing — particularly strong demand for physical copies in Latin America — point the other way.
Nintendo also has a practical advantage here. It has never built its business around optical discs in the way Sony has; Switch 2 uses cartridges, including its Game-Key Card system for some titles, where a physical card unlocks a download and still has to be inserted to play. A card like that can still be resold, shared within a family, or collected, which keeps much of what players like about physical media while giving publishers a cheaper format to produce.
For families, that flexibility is easy to understand. A cartridge can move between kids, consoles, and households without account transfers or a reliable internet connection. For collectors, a box on a shelf is part of the hobby. And for preservation, a physical release is simply harder to erase than a listing in a digital store.
None of this slows the wider move toward digital. Downloads are cheaper to distribute, easier to update, and now account for the majority of sales on most platforms. Sony's decision reflects that reality, and Nintendo is not pretending otherwise.
But for Switch 2 owners heading into the holiday season, the message is clear enough: physical games are not an afterthought Nintendo is quietly winding down. They are a deliberate part of the platform — and, for this generation at least, they are staying.