Topic: The lack of onboard memory is slowly becoming an issue.

As my physical Switch collection has grown, the Switch's onboard memory for game saves is steadily shrinking. Most game post-patching for physical releases is filtered through the Switch's onboard memory before it's saved on the micro sd card. With my onboard memory now dipping below 10 GB, I'm becoming concerned about the necessity to unwillingly delete game saves just for the sake of updating games I'm actively playing.

Yes, I could just upload the save data to the cloud, but I'm not an NSO subscriber.

It isn't worth the $1.66/month, tbh.

Yeah thats true. And micro sd cards are expensive!

@1ofUs not really, an 128gb will cost you about 20-30$

@Magician how many games do you won? I have over 100 games with about 30 physical and I have 22.5gb available on the internal memory. As long as you have a sd card it will save on it anyway. The only thing that allways go to the internal memory is the save data (for all games either physical or digital)

The onboard memory is slightly faster than running off cart or sdcard, so I put Borderlands2 on there because of vending machine farming. A few seconds per load adds up really fast.

I have about 14? physical games, but I wish it were more. My sdcard is almost full, and the idea of switching those out is kinda annoying. I’d still rather do that than just assume Nintendo will have my back so I can redownload my games forever.

@Magician
I'm sorry, you're a swell person and I always enjoy your comments, but the last bit about 1.66/month not being worth it made me chuckle. Your budget is that tight that you can't afford 2 bucks a month? Or you can't find something frivolous for 1.66 to cut out of your budget every month?

@Magician I don't know what settings your using buy only saved game data is on the internal storage and most updates are on the sd card if you setup correctly. Mine is set to save update and downloads to sd card so unless your card is 50mega bits then you seem to not have your setup correctly.

@Magician You could ask Nintendo what happens if you fill the internal memory. Although, I have a feeling it's not an accommodating answer.

Forgive me if this sounds really, really dumb but, with your giant game library, if the internal memory is a limiting factor, a second switch might be the only solution. And I know that's a terrible idea. But if Nintendo never planned on someone having as many games as you're on track for, maybe that's what you're up against? UNLESSS a revised Switch console has a bigger internal memory. 🤔

That would help alot of us if we upgrade Switch.

Nintendo probably haven't put much thought into that given the crazy number of games it'd take to completely fill up the internal storage with save data. Can't imagine many people running into this problem so they're not likely to get many complaints about it. I still have over 14GB free despite spending most of my free time playing Switch since launch so I doubt I'm going to run out in the Switch's life time at this rate.

@BenAV True but they could've at least given 128gb to start 32gb was way to small and if it was about the price I think they missed the mark for it.

32GB was presumably predicated on the facts that most users aren't going to buy that many games over the lifetime of the system (the current tie ratio is around six games per console sold for what it's worth,) that most of them would be on cartridge, and that the bulk of those would be first party games with only modest storage requirements.

If you're not doing any of those things you're an outlier. Ah well, at least they went with SD cards over proprietary storage for expansion, and I'd think that anyone who can afford to buy enough games to fill up the internal storage with just the save data is probably going to be able to afford an NSO account too.

@Matt_Barber Yeah but with lockdowns being the norm, a lot more people will be buying digital. So hopefully nintendo addresses this along with the joy con design in the switch pro.

I've filled my 128gig card, and looking at something bigger, but the price is getting expensive

I've wondered what happens if you run out of space for saves. Most games auto-save, so do they all handle out-of-space issues well? Since you can fill your internal memory with games it must be fairly easy to run out of save space?

There are some games with 5GB save files if I recall? And Animal crossing comes to mind where they actively prevent multiple islands saved on one console, which is presumably to reduce the save space needed.

@Wargoose Running out of microSD space due to digital games is an entirely different issue and one that there's already a pretty good solutions for. When I filled up my 400GB card and didn't want to invest in a larger one, I just started archiving games that I was finished with or wouldn't be playing in the near future. Pretty good way to save space while also getting to keep all your game icons in the software list.

@chardir Thankfully games with super large save files are very uncommon. Largest I have is the old version of Minecraft which takes up 2GB (I really should delete that at this point) and then the next largest out of the few hundred games that I've played is only like 100MB or so I think. Most are between 0-64MB.

Seems like you would need an obscene number of physical cartridges to fill up the 32GB of internal Switch memory with save files, certainly far more games than any person would have the time to actually play.

@Mountain_Man Magician has 700 games, most or all physical. 😉

The internal storage is the fastest way to load a game on Switch.

Why waste it on game saves lol. Amateur hour.

Yeah, that's ridiculous. It's obviously atypical and not the sort of use case Nintendo would have had in mind when designing the system.

Yes, but even that case is covered by getting an NSO subscription and using the cloud backup.

Sure, it'd be nice for Nintendo to offer a premium model with extra storage for those who are hell bent on buying and playing ever game under the sun, but when the vast majority of users are going to be fine with 32GB it doesn't really strike me as that much of an issue.

I'm far more irked by the fact that there are still rather a lot of games that you cannot back up the save file, seemingly only because a handful of games designers have a bee in their bonnet about savescumming.