I hate it when you buy a physical game, insert the disk, and immediately have to download the game in order to play the game because the disk only contains a launcher and a key. Insanity of the worst kind.

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hbn 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Nintendo is pretty good for putting a solid 1.0 version of their games on the cartridges on release. But on the other hand, the Switch cartridges use NAND memory which means if you aren't popping them into a system to refresh the charge every once in a while, your physical cartridge might not last as long as they keep the servers online so you could download a digital purchase.

I've kinda given up on physical games at this point. I held on for a long time, but the experience is just so bad now. They use the cheapest, flimsiest, most fragile plastic in the cases. You don't get a nice instruction manual anymore. And honestly, keeping a micro SD card in your system that can hold a handful of games is more convenient than having to haul around a bunch of cartridges that can be lost.

I take solace in knowing that if I do still have a working Switch in 20 years and lose access to games I bought a long time ago, hopefully the hackers/pirates will have a method for me to play them again.

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wtallis 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> the Switch cartridges use NAND memory which means if you aren't popping them into a system to refresh the charge every once in a while, your physical cartridge might not last as long

You've been paying attention to the wrong sources for information about NAND flash. A new Switch cartridge will have many years of reliable data retention, even just sitting on a shelf. Data retention only starts to become a concern for SSDs that have used up most of their write endurance; a Switch cartridge is mostly treated as ROM and only written to once.

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hbn 2 days ago | parent [-]

What's "many years"?

I've read about people's 3DS cartridges already failing just sitting on a shelf.

	▲	hbn a day ago \| parent [-]
		Speak of the devil, I just got this tweet in my feed today https://x.com/marcdwyz/status/1999226723322261520

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Dylan16807 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Are you sure those flashes are capable of refreshing?

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maccard 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The read speed off of an 8xDVD is ~10MB/s. The cheapest 500GB SSD on Amazon has a read speed of of 500MB/s. An NVMe drive has is 2500MB/s. We can read an entire DVD's capacity (4.7GB) from an SSD in under 10 seconds, compared to 8 minutes.

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crest 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Or the launch day patch is >80% the size of the game, but I don't want to go back to game design limited by optical media access speeds.