Nintendo Switch 2 Game-Key Card Overview | Nintendo Support
en-americas-support.nintendo.com

Game-key cards are different from regular game cards, because they don’t contain the full game data. Instead, the game-key card is your “key” to downloading the full game to your system via the internet.

Pay a premium for a physical copy of your game, and the cartridge may not contain the actual game. Only on Nintendo Switch 2.

  • ChapulinColorado@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    14 hours ago

    The point about Nintendo not having significantly larger sizes on games could be attributed to a few things:

    • Their developers were sometimes exclusively making Nintendo games = more familiar with the hardware and how to use it effectively
    • They were guaranteed to sell a few million copies of a game = they could afford to run the numbers on refactoring the games resources and asset logic to maximize cartridge size and still come up on top. With the scale of sales, this could cover a specialized developer exclusively optimizing techniques to save on that front
    • Many third party studios run their games through some converter and fix what’s remaining, the result are turd sized and non-optimized executables. E.g.: see iOS and Android app and game install sizes.