The Nintendo Switch 2 has been a huge success on launch, despite unfortunately slow third-party offerings due to the lack of dev kits available to developers. What few third-party games there are for the system have been criticised for their physical releases which opt for Game Key Cards that have no data on them at all.
While some developers have been rightfully criticised for their use of Game Key Cards as a cost-saving measure, Ubisoft has offered a new explanation for its upcoming release of Star Wars Outlaws.
The studio’s divisive open world game appears to actually run rather well on the system, despite early signs pointing to disappointment. However, the game will release as a Game Key Card not to save costs, but because Nintendo Switch 2 cartridges simply don’t have the bandwidth to support the high rate of data streaming needed for the game.
In a post on BlueSky, an audio architect for the Snowdrop game engine, which powers the upcoming Star Wars port, revealed that the current Nintendo Switch 2 cartridges do not have the speed required to run the game at an acceptable level of performance. Unlike Cyberpunk 2077, which was released on cartridge, Star Wars Outlaws was designed around the high-performance SSDs in the Xbox Series and PS5 conso les.
“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,” said audio engineer Rob Bantin. “I don’t recall the cost of the cards ever entering the discussion – probably because it was moot.”
Bantin explained that a game designed first and foremost for the Nintendo Switch 2 probably could’ve been put on a cartridge, but not Star Wars Outlaws. Despite being considerably faster than a Switch 1 cartridge, the new Nintendo Switch 2 carts aren’t as fast as a modern home console’s internal SSD.
“I think if we’d designed a game for Switch 2 from the ground up it might have been different,” Bantin continued. “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.”
Nintendo Switch 2 cartridges have been found to be significantly slower than the console’s internal storage as well as the console’s MicroSD Express cards. While this doesn’t excuse every developer from using Game Key Cards, massively demanding games like Star Wars Outlaws actually do have one.
