Nintendo’s data-free, download-unlocking Game Key Cards have proven popular with game publishers, even as they’ve drawn ire from many fans of games stored on physical media. Now, though, a developer on Star Wars Outlaws is saying that a technical limitation of the Switch 2’s Game Card interface may be driving some publishers away from fully physical game releases on the Switch 2.
Writing in a Bluesky thread discussing the performance of the Outlaws’ Switch 2 port [which is only available as a download or Game Key Card], Snowdrop Audio Architect Rob Bantin chimed in to discuss why a full physical release wasn’t in the cards for the Switch 2.
“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,” Bantin wrote. “I think if we’d designed a game for Switch 2 from the ground up it might have been different. As it was, we’d build a game around the SSDs of the initial target platforms, and then the Switch 2 came along a while later. In this case, I think our leadership made the right call.”
It’s no secret that Switch 2’s eMMC cartridges (which max out at a reported 400 MB/s) load game data more slowly than either the console’s MicroSD Express expansion cards (reported at 800 MB/s or more, depending on the card) or the Switch 2’s internal storage (reported at 2,100 MB/s). For a game like Mario Kart World, that difference might mean a noticeably longer loading screen when you first start up the game from a Game Card, for instance.
But Star Wars Outlaws was designed from the ground up to stream data as it’s needed from the extremely fast SSDs on consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series S/X (which max out at a reported 4.8–5.5 GB/s). Bantin’s post suggests the developer wasn’t willing to compromise the port’s quality by squeezing that content through the relatively narrow 400 MB/s bus of a physical Switch 2 card.
CD Projekt Red VP of Technology Charles Tremblay has alluded to this same challenge when talking about the Switch 2 port of Cyberpunk 2077. In a June interview with IGN, Tremblay said the data transfer speeds enabled by MicroSD Express were “great,” while streaming data from a Switch 2 Game Card was merely “okay.” Tremblay did go on to say that “all the performance we have on [input/output] is very good on [the Switch 2],” especially compared to the extremely slow physical hard drives that plagued Cyberpunk 2077‘s performance on older hardware.
Slow down, you move too fast
From the outside, it’s a bit odd that Nintendo allowed this loading-speed dichotomy to exist on the Switch 2 in the first place. On the original Switch, read speeds for both SD cards and Game Cards reportedly maxed out around 90 MB/s. But when designing the new Switch 2 game cards, Nintendo settled on a format that would stream data much more slowly than for downloaded games on the same console.
That decision might have been an attempt to minimize hardware costs for the Switch 2’s Game Card interface. If so, though, it doesn’t seem to have done much to reduce the costs of manufacturing Switch 2 game cards themselves. The cost of manufacturing those physical Game Cards has been frequently cited as a major reason many publishers are using cheaper Game Key Cards in the first place, though Bantin said that he “[didn’t] recall the cost of the cards ever entering the discussion [for Star Wars: Outlaws]—probably because it was moot.”
Nintendo could get around this variable loading speed issue by letting players pre-install games from a Switch 2 Game Card to internal or expansion storage, as Microsoft and Sony have either allowed or required on their disc-based consoles for decades now. But that solution might prove onerous for physical game card players who want to avoid clogging up the limited 256GB of internal storage on the Switch 2 (and/or avoid investing in pricey MicroSD Express cards).
As time goes on, many developers will likely learn how to adapt to and tolerate the Switch 2’s relatively slow Game Card interface. But as gamers and the industry at large continue to transition away from physical media, some developers might decide it’s not worth compromising on loading speeds just to satisfy a shrinking portion of the market.
