According to the Wall Street Journal, Nintendo is pushing back the introduction of larger 64GB game cards for the Switch.
Lead image: Kotaku
Nintendo, the WSJ writes, had planned to make them available during the second half of 2018, but has reportedly told developers that they would have to wait. According to the WSJ, the reason given is technical issues.
As Kotaku previously reported, Nintendo’s Switch games keep their size slim, with downloads for Super Mario Odyssey, Arms and Splatoon 2 ranging from 2-6GB.
However, third party developers have been releasing bigger, data-heavy games, outpacing the Switch’s 24GB of usable onboard memory.
Kotaku reached out to Nintendo regarding this report, but did not hear back prior to publication.
Comments
9 responses to “Report: Nintendo Delaying 64-Gigabyte Game Cards For Switch Until 2019”
Come on, Nintendo. Either get the lead out and make a 128 GB card lest you wish a repeat of the Nintendo 64 which drove 3rd party developers and/or publishers to your competitors.
In an age where the average AAA PC game is 30-50gb easily, it’s kind of sad that you couldn’t fit a single one of those games on the entire storage of a Switch, much less save your game afterwards. Tells you how much they have to half-arse things to fit them on such small storage.
Or how much they half-arse things on other platforms and don’t bother to trim any of the fat.
That fat is called uncompressed textures and audio which leads to faster gameplay due to less processing needed. Something the switch with lower powered hardware definitely utilises as well. It’s also generally the reason console games are larger than their pc counterparts as they use less compression.
Even though the original post was talking about PC games being larger than/too large for consoles?
And yeah, when fantastic-looking and sounding games can exist in less than half a dozen gigabytes (on both PC *and* consoles), I have little sympathy for those that take dozens and still look mediocre.
At the same time though the Switch is definitely not a PC and does not have the capability of pumping the same kinds of textures and resolutions out of it, so they can get away with making the data for the games smaller.
Really Nintendo we have till 2019 for 64GB game cards? That’s a complete slap to the face and that is bullshit.
People complained en masse about Sony and Microsoft’s consoles being underpowered, yet here we are with another piece of plasticky Nintendo junk, straight out of yester-year. Only this time, it costs as much as a PS4 Pro. Launched with a grand total of two games, no cross/backwards compatibility and now this.. Thinking 24gb is sufficient in this day and age and not having the foresight to pre-approve expandable storage. “Functionality” is an afterthought with Nintendo.
They should have made the game cartridges with 8-16gb on board storage for updates, DLC, game saves, etc.