alt Hacker NewsI 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.
Replies
maccard • yesterday at 3:52 PM
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.
crest • yesterday at 12:33 PM
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.
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.