Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

Looks like LA Noire is the next Switch game to have a large download for physical owners announced, 14GB this time. Increasingly more evidence that if you want to delve into big 3rd parties on Switch, you must a large microSD card. If you're just getting 1st party games and indies then you don't need a microSD card at all.

@Grumblevolcano Where did you see that?

And oh come on. Nintendo finally looks like they're getting 3rds on board and we have to deal with this crap. So the cost of the system is no longer $300 if you even think about getting 1 of these games. It's more like $350 to $400 almost mandatory. Yes I just got a 256gb card but still half of that will be used up with the games I want and we still dont know if Skyrim will do this or not.

@Grumblevolcano This is getting very annoying. Games like this are not proper physical releases.

@Grumblevolcano I thought the reason why Switch owners were paying more for 3rd party releases was because of the cartridge being more costly to produce?

If this game requires that size download, then they might as well release it as a digital only title.

@NintendoFanBoy16 Yeah, bigger cartridges are more expensive, so pay up, but wait, we can offer it as a mandatory download too! What did you say about cartridge costs again?

@Spoony_Tech @MegaTen Nintendo Everything.

@MegaTen Then somehow Xenoblade 2 fits fully on the cart, not even data pack downloads required.

@Grumblevolcano Do we know that for sure yet? This LA Noire news comes out 2 weeks before release. Plus Nintendo gets their carts cheaper then 3rds do so they can use a bigger card without taking the hit.

@MegaTen They really need to see this as a problem and address it accordingly. If that means lower cost then do so. I've bought one 256gb card and I'm not buying anymore during the systems life!

@Spoony_Tech No but if it did, that would make 3rd parties look even worse than they do now.

@Grumblevolcano The issue is that third parties need to buy the cards from Nintendo, so they spend more per card than Nintendo themselves. On top of that, Nintendo is more familiar with their own hardware than anyone else, and their games don't have to be as profitable as other publisher's. Nintendo also makes money from selling game cards, selling the console itself, collecting royalties from third party sales, etc. They have other revenues third parties don't have, so they can allow themselves to spend extra time and resources on optimisation.

That being said though, they should've foreseen this issue. I think it may hurt third party sales in the long run.

What's the point of having 32gb carts if nobody actually uses them?

That LA Noire news pissed me off. Because they're alr3ady charging more. I don't mind paying more provided the whole game is on the cart.

I imagine Nintendo, in their effort to get 3rd parties on board, recommended cutting costs buy proposing smaller carts with large downloads.

It pisses me off. It's not gonna stop me from buying the games but, I am NOT happy about it. But if this is the cost of finally having some notable 3rd party games on Switch, I suppose it's not the worst thing in the world. Nintendo needs to do something. Take the hit and offer all carts at the same price to ensure games use the largest size possible. 32gb was already not enough. 16 is laughable for these games

@JaxonH Thank you for finally seeing the dark side lol. I swear I thought you were going to sugarcoat this somehow like you usually do. I've been in a sour mood all morning bwcause of this. Not for my sake because I can buy whatever I want when I want but we are in the minority and most won't be able to afford all these extra expenses.

The ball is now in Nintendo's court but I don't think they even see they have a problem. They better wake up before something negative happens and start offering up solutions other then passing large downloads off on the consumer.

I also think 3rds know they are going to get some backlash on this so they're announcing these dl's as late as possible.

Ouch. I guess we'll see how drastically this impacts sales for big third party games on the Switch.

If this is going to be the normal practice with large third party games, I know this has already been discussed vigorously in this thread and other Switch threads maybe the time has come to allow external hard drives to be connected to the Switch dock to allow transfer of games.
Not everyone has enough money to put down on a 256gb micro sd cards. Here in the UK the price of a 200gb card is coming in around the £70, but the 256gb card is almost double at £131.99. The price of the 200gb card is not too bad, it could be worse though at least Nintendo didn't go the proprietary memory card route like Sony did with the Vita, those prices did sting!

I have a sneaking suspicion that the issue isn't actually the manufacturing costs, but rather the fact that third parties have to buy the carts from Nintendo, who is charging ridiculously high fees for them in order to make a nice chunk of profit.

@JaxonH Yeah, I don't have a microSD card for my Switch yet but I'm going to get one soon so I don't miss out on games like DOOM.

Also, thanks for your advice in one of the threads about keeping 10% internal storage unused. I was having XB1 problems after the 2 most recent updates but when I transferred 2 games over to the external, it's working much smoother (before was about 7% unused and after was 11% unused).

Surely every dev wants the industry to go fully download only. So this partial download issue could work in their favor long term, as buyers get increasingly conditioned to downloads.

But hopefully, as Snitch install base increases, the price for these game cards might come down.

@gcunit Better watch out. Snitches get stitches.

@Spoony_Tech
I've never been thrilled about these companies cheaping out, but until now it was always an either or situation. Either a large download, or it cost more. This is the first time it has a large download and costs more. There is no way that extra $10 doesn't pay for the jump to a 32gb cart multiple times over.

And that's why this pisses me off so much.

At the end of the day, at least Nintendo's games and all the middle market games won't have this issue. It is well and truly only the AAA 3rd party titles. A 400gb should cover it for me. But it does put a damper on my plan to buy all Nintendo's major 1st party titles digitally. I better plan for more space being used for crap like this.

They're selling us half games. Half games. Half the game on cart... What's the point.