According to an audio engineer over at Ubisoft, Star Wars Outlaws is shipping on a Game-Key Card not because of the cost of full cartridges, but because data transfer speeds are too slow otherwise. The common assumption around the net has been that publishers are cheaping out because Nintendo is charging too much for 64 GB carts, but maybe there really is a technical reason for requiring users to download game data.
In a post on Bluesky, Ubisoft’s Rob Bantin (who does audio engineering for the Snowdrop Engine) wrote, “Snowdrop relies heavily on disk streaming for its open world environments, and we found the Switch 2 cards simply didn’t give the performance we needed at the quality target we were going for. I don’t recall the cost of the cards ever entering the discussion – probably because it was moot.”
Now, the first thing you might be thinking about is Nintendo’s own games. Mario Kart World, for instance, is a massive open-world title and it streams data from the cartridge without much delay. Bantin did have a followup response, noting that Star Wars Outlaws’ existence as a port of a title developed for SSDs made the conversion more difficult. If the game had been created for the Switch 2 from the start, then the limited speed of Switch 2 cartridges would probably not affect things.
To further clarify, Bluesky account “Nintendo Patents Watch” then shared the patent information for Switch 2 cartridges and it notes that the read speed of the card is capped around 400 MB/s. The cartridges used eMMC standards, which are dramatically slower than both the console’s internal memory and an SD Express card. If you think that sounds fine, the Switch’s internal storage reads at around 2.1 GB/s while SD Express cards read between 800-900 MB/s.
Initially, I thought this claim might be a load of nonsense, but the technical specifications do back it up. While certain older games shipping on Game-Key Cards could be a cost cutting measure, there is likely a reason why some devs would opt for downloads to ensure playability. Cyberpunk 2077 has versions available for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, so it likely got around any limitations simply through brute optimization.
More on Game-Key Cards
Japan’s national library will not be preserving Switch 2 Game-Key Card titles
Switch 2’s ‘game-key cards’ won’t be console or account locked
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
