Why switch saves are so bloated?

[Reploid]

Never lets me sleep at night. Why, just why? I think it's not switch's fault per se, it really lies on developer's conscience, mostly but... Just think about it.
Xenoblade 2 is 4.3mb. Totally fine, it's a huge ass RPG with open world and fat character cast.
Fire Emblem is 16.3mb. Also tolerable, hard to say if it's as big as X2, but certainly a lot of stats to track.
Cris Tales is 64.4mb. Black Book is 48.4 Hey, what? These RPGs are pretty small in scale, and each take more than FE and X2 combined?

Smash bros is 106mb. A lot of stats, but that's a just a fighting game. Same with Blazblue and 32.4

Freakin monster is Dragon Quest Builders 2 with 2000 (!) megabytes of storage. I know there are large custom worlds to save, but when zipped with tinfoil it's a few dozen times smaller.

My theory that if the game has multiple save slots (sometimes a hundred of them), the save file of the switch just hogs up all of this space at once. Which is really a lazy way to organize a save file, no matter how many slots you actually use.

So the more you play, the less and less space you'll have on your NAND. You could zip up and store old saves on homebrew enable switch, or pay a penny for cloud storage if you vanilla.

Thanks at least that when you delete your game, you won't delete your save by default like it was on vita. That was much more stupid than just some bloated saves.

 

[nWo]

Yeah I have seen some stupid big ass saves even from indie games. I can understand some examples like the ones you mentioned, but there are out there many games that take a shitload of space out of the blue.

For example, Megaman Legacy Collection 2 is 64mb, same for CastleVania Advance Collection... What the hell?
Hermitage: Strange Cases is good but it is a fuckin visual novel, and takes 51.5 mb. Namcot Collection 52.5mb (all fucking ultra retro classics)

So, I'm sure it is just the lazy ass from the developers if the game is not a mammoth one, because as you said, Xenoblade 2 for example, there you got some good reasons and the save size is very small.

We will never know exactly why but, yeah, is kind of annoying. I feel your frustration bro.

 

[masagrator]

Freakin monster is Dragon Quest Builders 2 with 2000 (!) megabytes of storage. I know there are large custom worlds to save, but when zipped with tinfoil it's a few dozen times smaller.

This can be because they are streaming data from it regularly and their compression makes performance suffer (or it would take too much time to save).

In other cases they could use compression easily. But maybe they see it's taking only few tens of MB and they don't care, not taking into account that people are playing dozens of games and this accumulates over time.

 

[deathblade200]

for games like Dragon Quest Builders and Minecraft they prelocate a few GB in order to avoid issues such as crashes

 

[cucholix]

Most games developed by Baltoro uses big ass saves (40mb or so) but I don’t complain they are perfect as donors for Saturn Tribute injection
Ludomania for example is a simple board game that uses a 64.4mb save.

Funny thing is some games reserve this big save file size in the nca but never fill out with data. It’s just some developers no caring about saves files size, most Nintendo games make miracles with just 2mb for the save.

 

[Draxzelex]

Never lets me sleep at night. Why, just why? I think it's not switch's fault per se, it really lies on developer's conscience, mostly but... Just think about it.
Xenoblade 2 is 4.3mb. Totally fine, it's a huge ass RPG with open world and fat character cast.
Fire Emblem is 16.3mb. Also tolerable, hard to say if it's as big as X2, but certainly a lot of stats to track.
Cris Tales is 64.4mb. Black Book is 48.4 Hey, what? These RPGs are pretty small in scale, and each take more than FE and X2 combined?

Smash bros is 106mb. A lot of stats, but that's a just a fighting game. Same with Blazblue and 32.4

Freakin monster is Dragon Quest Builders 2 with 2000 (!) megabytes of storage. I know there are large custom worlds to save, but when zipped with tinfoil it's a few dozen times smaller.

My theory that if the game has multiple save slots (sometimes a hundred of them), the save file of the switch just hogs up all of this space at once. Which is really a lazy way to organize a save file, no matter how many slots you actually use.

So the more you play, the less and less space you'll have on your NAND. You could zip up and store old saves on homebrew enable switch, or pay a penny for cloud storage if you vanilla.

Thanks at least that when you delete your game, you won't delete your save by default like it was on vita. That was much more stupid than just some bloated saves.

Well...none of us can actually answer this question because only the developers configure what is save data. We can only theorize and conjecture.

 

[Reploid]

Somewhat urgent update.

Elastomania Remastered is a small game, about 64mb. And it's save file... is 64mb. Not that's beyond good and evil. Or just extremely lazy coding, since there is barely anything remastered about this game.