Third parties will just focus on digital only sales and whatever they get from key cards is a bonus. Unless Nintendo themselves wants to subsidize the $16/copy cost of a cartridge and I doubt they will do that, nor do I think Nintendo even wants the option of $16 more expensive Switch 2 games on the market (because then that makes the ecosystem look bad if games are so much more expensive on the Switch 2 versus PS5/XBX across the board at retail). So they're not likely to encourage that route either.
I haven't seen one major third party change their mind on this and with physical sales evaporating on the Playstation and XBox platforms, think 3rd parties will just ride this out on Switch 2. It's not their primary platform for most of their games, just a place where the sales of a game have to cover the porting costs.
FF7 Rebirth was 145GB on PS5, but they reduced it to 88GB on Steam Deck, but that likely already is using a lot of compression tricks and it probably can't go much lower than that without reducing the quality of the game assets (read: textures). 88GB is still too big for a 64GB cart. 64GB is not going to cut it for this generation, there already are games too big for that size.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 26 September 2025
