this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Nintendo Switch 2 Game-Key Card Overview (en-americas-support.nintendo.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
66 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Game-key cards are different from regular game cards, because they don’t contain the full game data. Instead, the game-key card is your "key" to downloading the full game to your system via the internet.

Pay a premium for a physical copy of your game, and the cartridge may not contain the actual game. Only on Nintendo Switch 2.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Storage is cheap. Others are being cheap too.

For that I in part understand the switch module price if that's indeed nvme speed or something.

But switch 1? Not really.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It was, though.

Objectively. This is not an opinion.

Switch 1 carts HAD to be purchased from Nintendo. It wasn't an off the shelf part. They weren´t SD cards priced commercially, they were a specific order that was part of manufacturing a physical copy and stacked up on top of printing labels and paperwork, making cases, shipping them to stores and so on. Margins for physical media are garbage as it is, but Switch carts were significantly more expensive than, say, a PS5 BluRay and they crucially ramped up quickly with size.

Technically the carts were available to higher sizes, but there's a reason you very rarely saw any Switch 1 games with cart sizes bigger than 16 gigs. Basically the more stuff you put in your game the more expensive it was to physically make the boxed copies. Crucially, that is a cost you had to pay whether you sold the carts or not. It was a manufacturing cost.

Look, at this point it's hardly worth it trying to wrap one's head around industrial retailed boxed copy software manufacturing, but trust me, physical Switch games were relatively and absolutely expensive to make in an environment where digital distribution was king and the next most expensive version was dirt cheap optical media.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I know. But then Nintendo was making a buck and someone else was being cheap by either not taking the bigger module (to maximize profits) or not optimizing their game sizes like Nintendo often excels at.

I think we're on the same page but just having different thoughts details in this.

Apologies for maybe answering provocatively basically in the direction of rampant capitalism while agreeing hence triggering your effortful answer of things I know and agree on.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't know that Nintendo was forcing the issue for profit. I also don't know the costs and margins (if any) for Nintendo or who they were working with to get the storage, to be fair. But I have to assume that if Nintendo had signficantly cheaper access to storage and was artificially throttling to everybody else you'd have seen more first party games on larger carts, and that wasn't necessarily the case.

Regardless, any solid state storage was always going to be more expensive than optical storage and scale up with size gradually in a way that optical storage doesn't (until you have to go to a second disk or an additional layer, at least). Cartridges are just inherently riskier and more expensive, even at the relatively modest spec of the Switch 1. Definitely with what seems like competitive speeds in Switch 2.

That doesn't mean one has to like the consequences of it. At the same time I'm not sure I can imagine a realistic alternative for a portable. We're not doing UMD again, so...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The point about Nintendo not having significantly larger sizes on games could be attributed to a few things:

  • Their developers were sometimes exclusively making Nintendo games = more familiar with the hardware and how to use it effectively
  • They were guaranteed to sell a few million copies of a game = they could afford to run the numbers on refactoring the games resources and asset logic to maximize cartridge size and still come up on top. With the scale of sales, this could cover a specialized developer exclusively optimizing techniques to save on that front
  • Many third party studios run their games through some converter and fix what’s remaining, the result are turd sized and non-optimized executables. E.g.: see iOS and Android app and game install sizes.