Nintendo's Virtual Game Card lets you lend out digital Switch games

Summary: Nintendo has announced a new feature called the Virtual Game Card for the Nintendo Switch platform. Virtual Game Cards will let users load their digital games onto more than one system, as well as share them with friends or family members. This feature will be added in a future update.

Today, Nintendo held its surprise Nintendo Direct livestream event, during which it revealed a new Virtual Game Card feature coming to the Switch platform. The Virtual Game Card is a way for Nintendo Switch owners to more easily manage their digital game library. It also comes with some very useful features that, more or less, revolutionize how people will play their digital Switch games going forward.

Think about how you may swap a physical Switch game cartridge from one system to another. Say you have multiple Switch units in the house, for example. Maybe you started playing the game on the Switch Lite, but you want to continue playing on the Switch OLED. You just pop out the game cartridge and pop it into the OLED model. Virtual Game Cards will work the same way. Allowing you to create a Virtual Game Card that you can load onto one system, and move it to another if ever desired.

Of course, it’s going to offer some real benefits to those who have a lot of friends with a Nintendo Switch as well.

The Nintendo Switch Virtual Game Card will let you lend out your digital Switch library

This might be the biggest benefit of the feature. Say you have a friend who wants to borrow one of your Switch games, but you don’t own the physical version. With the Virtual Game Card, that won’t be a problem. Nintendo says that you can essentially share the game with them and they’ll have access to it for up to a two-week period.

There are, of course, a couple of caveats. First, Virtual Game Card swapping can only happen locally. That means you’ll need to be in the same household as the Switch unit that will be borrowing the game, and you’ll have to link with it the first time. From then on, you just need to be on the same Wi-Fi network. In addition to this, you can only share digital games with people who are part of your family group.

The family group requirement shouldn’t really be an issue. You can easily add friends to your family group for sharing. So that’s that. However, you’ll still need to have both systems in the same location at the time of sharing.

Still, this is going to be huge for Switch owners. It will essentially allow friends to share games with each other and grow their digital game libraries. You will also need to have an internet connection when loading or ejecting the Virtual Game Cards, though you won’t need it for playing those games. Unless those games are online.

These will be compatible with Nintendo Switch 2

Nintendo has also confirmed that the Virtual Game Card feature will be compatible with the Switch 2. Once the Switch 2 launches, if you have digital versions of games you bought on the Switch, you’ll be able to load those as Virtual Game Cards onto the Switch 2 after you eject them from the other console. It’s also worth noting that you can only freely arrange and load games on up to two systems. Although this doesn’t apply to games you want to lend to family group members.

A family group can have up to 8 people in it. So you can lend games from your digital library to everyone in the group. That being said, you obviously won’t be able to lend the same game to different people at the same time, as only one person can have a Virtual Game Card at a time.

Nintendo also confirms that after the lending period is up, games are automatically returned to the owner. Additionally, if you’re the person who borrowed a game, you keep the save data once the game goes back to the owner. Virtual Game Cards will be part of a software update released for the Nintendo Switch in late April.

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