Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable • Hacker News Board

Re: Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

#131

Post by musicale » Wed, May 07, 2025, 5:41 AM UTC

staticman2 wrote: post #93

kllrnohj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brand name 64GB microSDXC UHS-I cards are $10 retail. Figure Nintendo can get the actual flash storage directly much cheaper than that, probably more like $3-5. That hardly seems like a meaningful cost saving measure for a physical game, especially on a console that's pushing upwards of $80 as the game price.

Digital Foundry said these cards are estimated to cost game companies 16 bucks per unit.

That sounds like a better deal for Nintendo than SNES Game Paks, and much better than N64.

Re: Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

#132

Post by musicale » Wed, May 07, 2025, 5:52 AM UTC

rincebrain wrote: post #124

musicale wrote: post #118

It's a shame. The beautiful thing about Switch game cards is that you can just pop them in and play. Compare that to PS5 where you have a lengthy installation followed by a 40GB download...

As other people have observed, some Switch games did this too, in part or whole, it just wasn't branded as a distinct feature like this, the games just said "you need to download a day 1 update", like in your example.

I have yet to run into a single-player or local multiplayer Switch game that is not playable offline with just the cartridge.

Some single-player games have updates, but I think you can usually play the original version while you download the update, and the update usually isn't 40GB.

Re: Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

#133

Post by musicale » Wed, May 07, 2025, 6:04 AM UTC

addoo wrote: post #4

The article already touches on this, but in the modern day the games that exist on physical media are pretty much useless without their zero-day patches. Putting physical media aside, companies rarely make older builds available, so even when media contains a game and servers are up there is already plenty of ‘lost media’ if you consider old and interesting (potentially hilariously broken) old builds of virtually eve…

> in the modern day the games that exist on physical media are pretty much useless without their zero-day patches

Most single and local multiplayer Switch games are playable offline - which is to say, not useless - without any zero-day patches.

And patches to those games can often (usually?) be downloaded while you are playing the game. (Sometimes there are issues however - I seem to remember some game, maybe SMT5, changing its game save format in some way.)

But it is true that patches can improve performance or fix bugs, and it seems like there is pressure to hit a ship date and assume that bugs can be patched later. It's not entirely bad though - some games that are heavily criticized on initial release (No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077) end up fixing bugs and other issues and becoming successful games.

Re: Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

#134

Post by rincebrain » Sun, May 11, 2025, 10:31 PM UTC

musicale wrote: post #132

rincebrain wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As other people have observed, some Switch games did this too, in part or whole, it just wasn't branded as a distinct feature like this, the games just said "you need to download a day 1 update", like in your example.

I have yet to run into a single-player or local multiplayer Switch game that is not playable offline with just the cartridge. Some single-player games have updates, but I think you can usually play the original version while you download the update, and the update usually isn't 40GB.

At least personally, I've resigned myself to games being purely digital and most of my games aren't carts for the Switch, but I believe a number of the smaller indie games were basically just download codes in a box, or a cart that required downloading some of the core functionality. (I wanted to say it was Goat Simulator for Switch that I was thinking of, but I can't find any proof of this.)

https://old.reddit.com/r/NSCollectors/comments/dzquth/physic... is a thread about this, and it lists that the Spyro collection only allowed you to access the first world of each game in the collection without a download.