On Switch 2, Star Wars Outlaws is not stored on a card due to technical constraints
, by Thibaut
Like many games by third-party publishers, Star Wars Outlaws is available on Switch 2 in physical form via a game key card. This means that the title is not stored on the cartridge and must be downloaded in its entirety using a license key.
While the cost of standard 64GB cards is often cited as the reason for this decision, Ubisoft Massive likely had a perfectly valid technical reason for Star Wars Outlaws. This is explained to us by Rob Bantin, an audio architect working on the Snowdrop Engine.
On Bluesky, he states that since the engine relies heavily on disk streaming to manage the open world, the Switch 2 cartridge did not deliver the necessary performance. Star Wars Outlaws was originally designed for the PS5, Xbox Series, and PCs, all of which have high-performance SSDs. Nintendo's machine was therefore subject to significant technical limitations.
"Snowdrop relies heavily on disk streaming for its open world environments, and we found the Switch 2 cards simply didn’t give the performance we needed at the quality target we were going for. I don’t recall the cost of the cards ever entering the discussion - probably because it was moot.
I think if we’d designed a game for Switch 2 from the ground up it might have been different. 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."
Source: bsky.app