The good news? Star Wars Outlaws is now available on Nintendo Switch 2. The bad news? The physical version is, yes, you guessed it — a Game-Key Card.

Star Wars Outlaws was first released in August 2024 for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox to lackluster reviews, but the game’s Switch 2 iteration dropped yesterday, September 4. The game’s publisher, Ubisoft, shipped the port on the same day as Team Cherry’s highly anticipated Hollow Knight: Silksong — a bold move considering Outlaws‘ initial launch was met with a collective shrug.

The Game-Key Card medium is already a controversial one, giving way to game ownership and pricing concerns, as well as environmental waste worries due to ostensibly needless plastic use.

Over on the social media site Bluesky, Rob Bantin, the audio architect behind Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine, spoke about the team’s choice to utilize the controversial carts. The audio architect claims Switch 2 streaming speeds simply can’t keep up.

“Snowdrop relies heavily on disk streaming for its open world environments, and we found the Switch 2 cards simply didn’t give the performance we needed at the quality target we were going for,” Bantin explained. “I don’t recall the cost of the cards ever entering the discussion – probably because it was moot.”

Bantin continued in a reply to Digital Foundry’s John Linneman. “I think if we’d designed a game for Switch 2 from the ground up it might have been different. As it was, we’d build a game around the SSDs of the initial target platforms, and then the Switch 2 came along a while later. In this case I think our leadership made the right call.”

Linneman responds: “Honestly, and this sucks, I do kinda get it. To match other consoles, they needed storage that was fast like a modern SSD, right? The cost on that stuff has not come down like the flash memory used for SW1 games. I think they probably did what they could and, even still, those carts cost $23 a piece.”

Nintendo’s controversial cartridges have been a point of contention for the brand’s biggest fans since the handheld first dropped in early June. Traditionally, home consoles utilize a compact disc or cartridge to run video games; Nintendo’s Game-Key Cards are more a tangible representation of your purchase than a game itself. Despite looking almost exactly like the game-holding cartridges used by the Switch 2’s older sibling, the new, Mario-red “games” contain no software. Instead, these carts permit users to download the game to their handhelds.

No internet connection? Sorry! An internet connection is required for downloads, whether you have the “physical game” or not. Fans without access to a stable internet connection — around one-third of Americans — will just have to make do, even if they’ve already shelled out $60 for a copy of Outlaws.

Late last month, Japan’s National Diet Library (NDL) deemed the console’s Game-Key Cards ineligible for preservation. NDL spokespeople explained that “only physical media that contains the content itself” is eligible for preservation. Consequently, “a key card, on its own, does not qualify as content” and “falls outside of [the NDL’s] scope for collection and preservation.”

Check out Nintendo of America’s launch trailer for Star Wars Outlaws here:

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