Like many games, Star Wars Outlaws’ physical release on Nintendo Switch is a game-key card. But now we get to hear directly from a developer about why that ended up happening.
Rob Bantin, the audio architect for Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine, recently spoke about the situation on social media. In one post, Bantin noted that the “engine relies heavily on disk streaming for its open world environments, and Switch 2 cards didn’t give the performance needed for their quality target.” He went on to say that had Star Wars Outlaws been developed for Nintendo Switch 2 originally, “it might have been different.” Bantin added: “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.”
Much of the discussion surrounding game-key cards thus far has been about file sizes. Right now it seems that Nintendo isn’t offering many choices when it comes to true physical releases. If you want to have your game on a cartridge with no download (meaning not a game-key card), you basically have to go with 64GB, and some publishers don’t want to pay up for that. There are also already a number of Nintendo Switch 2 titles that exceed 64GB.
For Star Wars Outlaws, file size actually wouldn’t be an issue. The game is in the neighborhood of 20GB, so it would very much fit on a traditional cartridge. Ubisoft’s reasoning here seems to come down to technical limitations.
Star Wars Outlaws can be purchased now on Nintendo Switch 2. Find a new trailer for this version here.
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