Feature: “Game-Key Cards Don’t Sit Right With Us”

As far as the ‘Average Joe’ on the high street is concerned, the physical games market is practically dead and buried right now. Store shelves are emptier than ever, the usually reliable supermarket chains often no longer stock them, and we’re rapidly heading into a future in which the majority of Switch 2 carts won’t have any significant data on them.

Yet for the hardcore crowd — those whose passion for the physical article has yet to waver — there are thankfully still a few avenues to investigate. Limited Run Games, Super Rare Games, iam8bit… All of them have stumbled at some time or another, yet they remain some of the last bastions of physical games media.

But what if there was something even better? Well, Lost in Cult, the British firm known for its work on high-quality, bespoke Design Works books and Lock On magazines, is looking to offer up a collection of premium, limited edition physical games while also ensuring that standard versions are readily available via retail. The first batch includes Thank Goodness You’re Here! and The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow on Switch, and Immortality on PS5.

Transparency is the name of the game, and to find out more, we caught up with Ryan Brown, marketing director at Lost in Cult and the head of its new physical games label.

Nintendo Life: So, first of all, what made you want to start this initiative?

Ryan Brown: For myself and all of us at Lost In Cult, preservation is a huge topic that’s important to us. We’re all collectors, we all view video games as a serious art form, and we saw a way to not just apply the premium, high-end design and art touches that we’re known for, but to fix some of the issues we saw in the space and hopefully build a better precedent for physical games.

For example, we’re not locking games away behind our fancy limited versions. Those exist for fans that want to collect them, and we’ve put a lot of love into them, but standard retail editions also exist for availability options, and we’re working with DoesItPlay? to test our games are full on-cart/disc before production.

You mentioned that someone compared your EDITIONS products to The Criterion Collection – were there any similar brands that you looked to for inspiration?

Yeah, we’ve seen that comparison made a lot, which is a huge honour; being the video game equivalent to what Criterion is doing for films is absolutely brilliant. We of course looked to our own design principles with what we’ve applied to our Design Works books, first and foremost.

Our Design Director Rachel Dalton, and Art Director Stephen Maurice Graham have really led the cause on how our EDITIONS look and their incredible artwork and design. The likes of Criterion, A24’s films, Penguin Random House and Folio Society’s book all were comparison points we hoped to reach, but naturally our design and art teams are creative forces entirely of their own and we wanted to be distinctive in our own right.

Can you talk about what the process has been like from the initial conception stages to your recent announcement?

Yes! I don’t think people have really any idea how much work goes into something like this, especially in the way we’ve done it to try and offer the best case for collectors and gamers.

We’ve been working on this for over a year – in some way or another, since I joined in late 2023, but things really kicked off in early 2024. Conceptualising what we wanted this to be actually came first – so, what principles we wanted to stand on. For example, we knew from the start that we wanted to focus on preservation, and we wanted to make any game we worked on easily available, so partnerships like with DoesItPlay? and our distribution partner PM Studio came early on.

We actually started talking with many developer and publisher partners at the same time as we worked out our design identity – our first few titles, which you mostly see before you as our launch titles, were signed a year ago and largely entrusted us based on our prior experience and quality books, which is a real honour for us. As you can imagine, we’ve been speaking to a lot of partners, so we have a lot of exciting games in the pipeline already, and we have intentionally waited to launch until we were truly ready – we have our launch game builds in hand, they’re final builds, they’re tested by DoesItPlay? already, the art is all in hand, and we’ve test-printed EDITIONS already.

So, the process is really entirely different to how Lost In Cult has worked in the past, because we didn’t want people to have to wait too long for these games to go to print and ship.

How did you decide what goodies to include in the EDITIONS products, and why is it important that these remain consistent?

We almost worked backwards, so the consistency principle came first and we worked back from there. It was vital to me, as a collector myself, that these could remain a consistent collection that looks good next to each other on a shelf without anything looking amiss. I can’t stand boxes of all different sizes, with different design looks and contents.

While the collector mentality reason came first, there is a production benefit, in that the tooling has to be done once, the design templates done once, which massively speeds up our print timing. We don’t want people to wait a year for these EDITIONS; they ship at the same time as the standard retail copies, and we can work in advance on future titles already and it’s much faster for us to work this way. Plus, no heavy, large items means no giant shipping weights or costs. So, this method really just worked as a win-win-win across the board.

I don’t think people could really comprehend the lengths we go to ensure the quality we’re putting out.

As for the goodies included, again we pretty much worked backwards from our principles. We had the game preserved on disc/cart, sure, but we also wanted to preserve the story, impact, culture of the game, which our booklets achieve with analytical essays, developer interviews, and in-development artwork. We wanted to create genuinely high quality keepsakes, not disposable tat.

One anecdote I love telling is how we travel to our print partners just to feel the paper to ensure it is the right premium quality paper stock. I don’t think people could really comprehend the lengths we go to ensure the quality we’re putting out. We have high costs across our print materials, artwork etc for EDITIONS just in order to secure that very premium feel.

Physical media is great for preservation, but they too can become unplayable under certain conditions. What else should publishers be doing to ensure long-term preservation?

Absolutely; digital media should be better for preservation and long-term accessibility, but sadly, it just isn’t yet.

For us, it’s two-fold; on the physical front, ensuring that all the content is actually on the disc and cartridge – that you can take these games off your shelf in 30 years time, without the servers active, and play this game without hindrance, and that they’re easily accessible via retail standard copies without limited units.

The other part, of course, is that we work directly with museums and archive groups to share our games and materials with them whenever possible. We’re not the game rights holders though, of course. It’s really vital, more than ever in this growing age of lack of ownership and disposable entertainment, that developers and publishers publish their games without online restrictions that may make their games unplayable one day, to publish on as many storefronts as possible, to not lock games behind streaming services, to work with museum groups to provide game builds and development materials.

I’m an absolutist when it comes to preservation, where I want to see every game preserved and remain playable, but we’re a very far stretch away from that happening. In the meantime, we’re doing our bit.

You’re likely not keen on the idea, but do you foresee a future in which consoles no longer offer the ability to play physical media? What happens to initiatives such as this in that event?

I’m so unkeen on the idea, the thought makes me wonder if I’ll just bury myself away and play my massive games backlog at that point!.

No, but in all seriousness, I’ve thought about this a lot. We’re a ways away from that, because the people who buy physical still today are locked-in on it, and we’re not going away for decades, so there’s still good money in it for platformholders. I think even with next-gen consoles, they’ll be hard-pressed to remove the options.

We have some time until that happens, but even then, there’ll be something we can do. USB sticks with the DRM-free game on and merch inside a box, or something. There’s always going to be an audience for as long as I live, so there’s always going to be a way.

It almost feels like no game is truly “finished” these days when it comes to updates and patches. What challenges do you face when choosing which games to give the Lost in Cult treatment?

You’re right, and this is a huge challenge. I’ll even add to that and say that no physical publisher has any right to control developers or publishers over whether that happens. But we are in the best situation; we simply do not sign games where that is known to happen or likely to happen in the future, which of course is a big part of our conversation with partners.

I cannot stress enough that we are willing to walk away and not work on gigantic games that we believe wouldn’t be able to meet this commitment.

We check, check, check, and check again – and I’m not kidding, I ask so many times I get annoying – that builds are final and no patches or updates are planned, we have our preservation team DoesItPlay? test each game before we go to print, and if there’s any major issues, we go back to the developers.

In fact, we have one upcoming unannounced game that we specifically knew would likely receive a patch in future, and have advised they go ahead and do that now before we test or go to print, even if that means shipping gets slightly delayed. This is very, very important to us that games are as final as possible, and released with all the latest patches and content on disc without internet connectivity or patches required.

I cannot stress enough that we are willing to walk away and not work on gigantic games that we believe wouldn’t be able to meet this commitment.

You’re naturally focused on current-gen consoles for the time being, but can you foresee Lost in Cult going back to prior generations and reviving forgotten classics?

I’d really love that, especially as someone that particularly loves collecting for those consoles. My PS1, PS2, PS3, Wii, and DS collections especially get a lot of love, they’re very fun systems to collect for, and of course as someone approaching his mid-30s, were my childhood consoles of choice.

I wonder what options are available for those. We have this huge homebrew Game Boy revolution happening, which is fantastic, but a lot of those older systems, the printing processes are gone and you can neither license nor print for them anymore. Porting older games to newer consoles is sometimes the easier option. But yeah, we’ll see, of course those kinds of ideas are all interesting to us.

Switch 2 has garnered some controversy recently with its Game-Key Card releases. I’d love to know your thoughts on this – is it actually a viable solution, and will Lost in Cult’s commitment to include fully playable games on cart extend to the Switch 2?

Yes, we’re doing Switch 2 releases! Yes, they’re only full games on cart versions!

It goes without saying, Game-Key Cards don’t sit right with us and don’t fit into our ethos of games being fully on cart for future use. I understand why Nintendo created them as a better alternative to code-in-a-box type releases, but we’re never going to release Game-Key Card versions of games.

We’re some ways away from having Switch 2 releases on a monthly cadence, but we are in discussions for a few titles that may come as and when in the future, and we’ll only do full games on cart. We’re learning about things at the same time as most people reading this are, but if it turns out that costs on normal cartridges are significantly higher, I think most collectors would agree with us that it’s still the preferable option over empty carts.

Pie in the sky question, but are there any games that you would absolutely love to work on for a physical release?

Oh yes, gosh, tons. 1000xRESIST stands out to me, it’s one of my all-time favourite games, it just is such a special game and I’d love to work on that.

Annapurna, pretty much anything from them, their style of games are perfect fits for our EDITIONS. Promise Mascot Agency is a recent favourite of mine. I think everyone still wants Inside and Limbo on the Switch. The Sludge Life games, Boomerang X; maybe not a fit for us, but the Dadish series of games should get a physical release.

I have a long, long list of games I personally want physically, and personally want us to work on, which usually overlaps. It’s not on the Switch, but I’m going to mention Rollerdrome. It was my game of the year that year, I love it with all my heart. It’s a difficult one because the developer got shut down and the rights sold off, but it’s on my dream list for sure.

We’re also not restricting ourselves to indie games, I might add; our curation focuses on artistry, which usually sways towards indie, but I’d love the opportunity to give some AAA games our EDITIONS treatment, too.

This interview has been lightly edited.

Huge thanks to Ryan Brown for speaking to us. If you want to check out the new releases on Switch, you can head to the Lost in Cult website now. Standard editions are priced at £29.99 each, with EDITIONS costing £59.99 each. Staunch collectors can secure the full batch of Switch titles for a total of £179.97 (although currently there’s a £9 discount), including an as-yet unannounced title.

For the superfans, ‘Collection’ versions are available which include the EDITIONS game with a vinyl soundtrack release and giclee print (or, in the case of Thank Goodness You’re Here!, just the vinyl soundtrack). These range from £89.98 to an eye-watering £178.98 for the PS5 Immortality Collection, plus shipping.