By now third parties have pretty much put themselves in a position where they can't choose anymore. In particular Square-Enix who relied on poor excuses for many years and then changed course to drop PS (timed) exclusivity.

Right now third parties are in the phase of denial where they believe that Switch 2 owners will just deal with it when it comes to game-key cards despite the early evidence pointing towards a broad rejection of game-key cards.

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. 

Makes me wonder if Nintendo has told developers (at least the big ones like Square Enix) years before the release of the Switch 2 about how they're only providing 64gb cartridges, but then sold them on the lie about Game Key Cards and that consumers would be fine with that option too lol

Well FF7 remake game came out 5yrs ago, so if Square knew about this and planned to port it to Switch 2 then they had time.  If CD Projekt did it then there's really not much excuse for other devs.

Let's assume we're just talking about PS4 ports to Switch 2; FF7 remake alone on PS4 is roughly 60gb, while Cyberpunk was like +100gb.  If anything Square should have it easier to put on the actual Switch 2 cartridge than CD Projekt.

If anything, maybe devs should band forces and hold back releasing their games on Switch 2 until Nintendo's willing to provide a larger cartridge and/or reduce the cost of the cartridge significantly. Continue to port to Xbox is fine.

Nintendo has definitely put 3rd party devs in a tough position and it just feels that Nintendo isn't playing nice with anybody this gen (devs and consumers) except for ICE letting them use Pokemon like that loll jkkk not trying to get political.

I'm with you there. With the way Nintendo's going at it this gen I may skip the Switch 2.

It's not about playing nice. The cartridges are just fucking expensive. That's nobody's fault, it's just a reality of why cartridges are a shitty format in general. When they get expensive, it becomes problematic, always has been, always will be, this goes back to the 1980s. 

The Switch 3 probably won't even have physical media period, so good luck with that. 

The only thing cartridges ever really had going for them was they used to be significantly faster of a format than discs, but since playing games off discs is no longer a standard at all, cartridges are now basically the slowest format on the market, on top of being the most expensive way to distribute games. It has basically nothing going for it. 

I don't even buy that there's some big preservation angle here, the data on a cartridge is going to be exactly the same as data on internal storage or on an SD Card. 

No, ultimately it's actually Nintendo's fault. 

If Nintendo wanted a cheaper route they could've opt for some SD/micro SD format when they knew the cost of cartridges would be high. But nope...

Nintendo is the one that decided on which cartridge to use for the Switch 2, Nintendo is the one that decided what size the cartridge should be and only give one option of size (whereas the Switch 1 came in different sizes at least), Nintendo is also the one in charge of production of the cartridges where devs and publishers must purchase these cartridges from Nintendo as well. Sucks that for an expensive cartridge it can barely fit a decent 3rd party game.

You think Nintendo just randomly chose these cartridges and didn't think this wasn't going to be an issue for developers? Of course they did, that's why they came up with "Game Key Cards".  

Who knows, may be this is also Nintendo's secret agenda to push devs away from cartridges to just putting their games online so Nintendo will have an even tighter hold on controlling the games on there.

You saying "it's nobody's fault" is like saying it wasn't Sony's fault that their Vita memory cards were so expensive. Like of course it was Sony's fault, they chose to use that specific card rather than finding a cheaper alternative.

What a weird discussion the two of you are having.

Switch 2 game cards aren't prohibitly expensive, so let's not pretend they are. As usual, third parties are greedy, hence why gamers will save no money by third parties avoiding game cards.

From the information I can find devs/publishers are paying Nintendo $16/per cartridge, compared to like $1 for a 50gb blu-ray.  That's pretty expensive per game.

3rd parties may be greedy, but so is Nintendo.

It's Nintendo fault for being sentimental. They should have just not bothered with this whole farce to begin with and ripped the band aid straight off ... digital only, like every other modern portable platform is. That Playstation 6 portable, whatever it is will be digital only too, so will Steam Decks and XBox Portables and whatever else. And you know what? No one will complain one iota about that. 

Having some kind of even slower format that would be cheaper just would've lead to complaining as well as some people would not understand why the main cartridge is so slow and why they can't run games off the cartridge directly and then Nintendo would be blasted for making essentially useless cartridges by a bunch of people. There's no winning in this, the best thing to do would have been to not even bother playing this game to begin with. 

Cartridges are woefully inadequate as a format these days, just to get even 64GB at a crappy ass speed still costs $16/cartridge, they shouldn't have even bothered but they likely were hoping to use this generation as a transition phase before going all digital with the next Nintendo system and ease into it. Instead they probably should have just realized there's no pleasing some people and made the transition now and gotten the inevitable over with. 

Maybe even breaking from retail cleanly would have allowed lower game prices across the board since some portion of your sales no longer have a retailer + cost of physical taking $15-$20 off the top of your margin. 

You call Nintendo for being sentimental, Nintendo calls it the market. Switch 1 has sold a substantial amount of physical games so what makes you think its a smart idea to cut it off instantly? Because someone like you think digital-only is the future so let's just skip straight to it? There are millions out there still wanting physical, that's why Nintendo hoped Game Key Cards would be the compromise, but clearly it isn't getting the positive feedback they had hoped.

Personally, I haven't hear anybody complaining about any slow speed issue with physical games these days. I play games on both physical and digital, and not once have I noticed and thought running a game on physical was slow.  I think games are running fast enough as it is.  Maybe it's just you and a small handful that demand everything to load instantly?

Maybe you're right, Nintendo should've ripped the band aid straight and just made Switch 2 digital-only and see how it would unfold. However, since Nintendo chose to include physical media, it's their responsibility to ensure that aspect is implemented in a way that makes sense.

I know our discussion won't find any common ground so I will end it here.  Just circling back to the initial comment, that all of this cartridge/game key card issue is Nintendo's fault since they're the one that made the decision. That's all.

In what sense is Nintendo greedy here?