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"Seeing Nintendo do this is a little disheartening" – Switch 2 and the state of game preservation in 2025
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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I used to buy physical as much as I could, but nowadays it doesn't mean anything, so I don't care as much about it.
Flash memory cartridges die, even faster in cases of bad batches. Optical discs have disc rot (again, some worse than others). Many many games have updates, DLCs or patches that won't be on the physical medium. Plenty of games coming on discs have to be fully installed on the machine's drive anyway because disc drives are too slow.
Most indie games, including some of the best experiences out there, never get physical versions, or only very limited ones.
The only way to preserve is to duplicate and archive everything, even if it's not easy. Keeping original physical media as a souvenir is nice, but it doesn't achieve long term preservation.
I am 100% with you on this one.
I was against DLCs and digital games when they first came up with the PS360 generation. But physical games are generally incomplete, the boxes and support aren’t appealing to me anymore (removing the booklet was exactly when I gave up). You are not even playing from the discs anymore, all disc games are « game key cards » once your game is installed.
I went 100% digital since the Switch, much easier to handle and preserve, much more compact than stacking DVD boxes.
It was already an issue on Switch for some games. They just clarified when games are not complete, provided cheap carts for such games to reduce the cost. It’s not Nintendo’s fault if most editors are doing this. Nintendo is not doing it (at least for now). But as soon as you need a patch or a DLC, your physical games will be incomplete anyway.
Nintendo did it on at least one occasion, not counting games with big DLC that of course aren't on the cartridge.
Bayonetta 2 came with 1 on Switch, but only 2 is on the cartridge, 1 is a download code.
Bayonetta 1 got a (limited?) physical release alongside 3.
Apparently so. Doesn't change that 1+2 still had only half of its content on its cartridge.
Though they'd need a 32GB cart to put them on a single cartridge, and apparently those were used for like 12 games total. So maybe it would have been cheaper with 2 16GB. After all, the Wii U version of this pack had a physical disc for each game.