it seems wild the state of games and development today... imagine 131GB out of 154GB of data was not needed....
This reminds me of the old days when I check who's using my PC memory every now and then.
But it's stored because it's possible, easy, and cheap. Unlike older games, where developers would hide unused blocks of empty data for some last-minute emergency cramming if they needed it.
they're a fantastically popular franchise with a ton of money... and did it without the optimizations.
if they never did these optimizations they'd still have a hugely popular, industry leading game
minor tweaks to weapon damage will do more to harm their bottom line compared to any backend optimization
That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn
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.
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.
I've read about people's 3DS cartridges already failing just sitting on a shelf.
Cartridges were also crazy expensive. A N64 cartridge cost about $30 to manufacture with a capacity of 8MB, whereas a PS1 CD-ROM was closer to a $1 manufacturing cost, with a capacity of 700MB. That's $3.75/MB versus $0.0014/MB - over 2600x more expensive!
Without optical media most games from the late 90s & 2000s would've been impossible to make - especially once it got to the DVD era.