Gaming Switch game sizes

[NEZ8]

So im a new Switch owner and i was a bit surprised that physical game cards takes up space on my SD card / console memory. Some of the physical games takes up like 3GB on my console.

Isnt one of the main purposes of game cards so that you dont need to have the games take up space on your console memory?
It seems the only physical game that does not take up space on my console is the game which i refused to download an update for, but now instead i get the update message every time i start the game.
So is it these game updates for physical games that are the culprit taking up space on the console, i guess it is since the updates cant be saved on the game cards since they are non-writable?
If i remember correctly one of the games didnt even let me play the game before i did the update, i think it was NBA 2K18.

So what does these game updates do, are they important? It seems most of the physical games if not all, has asked me to do an update.
And can i not do the update but at the same time get rid of the update message every time i start the game?

 

[lordelan]

Updates are pretty common today.
While old console games (like SNES) had to be as bug free as possible and run out of the top since there was no way to update them, there's four reasons, why newer console games (like Switch games) require updates almost every single time:

1. It's easy to deliver those updates. The Switch has WiFi and can download them from the eShop so the devs don't care and just release updates this way.
2. Nowadays games are much bigger which gives more opportunities for bugs to appear. While you could easily test an old SNES game fully for any bugs by playing through it with a few people within a few hours back then, this isn't that easy with the games we have now.
3. I would say this is the main reason: Devs are rushing their releases so they don't even fix bugs they are already aware of before the release. That leads to the fact that they need to fix them afterwards (sometimes this doesn't even happen).
4. Cartridges are expensive. Many publishers decide to go with the smaller cartridges (which are cheaper than bigger ones) and put the rest of the initial release (!) into a mandatory day one patch.

 

[NEZ8]

Thanks for your answer. I think that since updates are so common on these newer generation games the game devs should use bigger game cards and the game cards should have been writable, so that the updates could be stored on the game card itself.

I wouldn’t have anything against updates if they were not stored on the console/SD card.

Also, maybe there are still people who has an internet subscription which has an limited amount of gigabytes of data per month, and these game updates can be several gigabytes sometimes? So for these people not even physical games are the answer.

 

[Vi3trice]

Also, maybe there are still people who has an internet subscription which has an limited amount of gigabytes of data per month, and these game updates can be several gigabytes sometimes? So for these people not even physical games are the answer.

Nintendo's own certification process seems less strict than the other companies, and does allow for cases like partial games on cartridges. The rest tend to rely on loopholes like compilations only having one game in the collection on disc. Technically playable from start to finish.