In the final days of our pre-Switch 2 world, Nintendo is trying to rethink how sharing games works. The biggest announcement from the company's latest Direct was its upcoming Virtual Game Cards feature, a new approach to sharing digital games that improves on the company's current system, but still carries limitations that keep it from feeling truly modern. Virtual Game Cards attempt to make digital games as easy to share as physical ones. That starts with the company visually representing games as "cards" and using the language of loading and ejecting them, and extends to how simple they are to share. Two Switch consoles logged into your Nintendo Account can share any digital game just by "ejecting" it from one and "loading" it on another.

Nintendo is overhauling how digital downloads work on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 with a new feature it's calling "Virtual Game Cards." Virtual Game Cards, which the company said during Thursday's Nintendo Direct livestream will launch in late April, are designed to better mimic the flexibility of physical games. It works like this: After buying a digital version of a game, the virtual card is loaded onto the player's Switch. Players can load or "eject" these game cards; with two systems, a player could eject a game on one system and load it onto another to play from that handheld. Although players will need a local connection to do so, it allows them to swap multiple games between systems quickly.