Super Mario Odyssey will be a measly, yet at the same time impressive, 5.7GB in total. The final figure comes from Nintendo’s Japanese site who listed it on their store page.
This is a pertinent topic, especially as NBA 2K18 recently revealed that it requires 5GB for save data alone. That’s almost the whole of Mario Odyssey for a save file. Just so you know, that amount is for each individual save file too…
While the small file size of Odyssey may have some gamers worried about the lack of content in the game, it’s worth remembering that Nintendo has state of the art optimisation and compression techniques at their disposal. Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U came in at about 1.7GB, for example. And that was packed with content.
The Digital Storage Problem
But why are other developers finding it hard to get their file sizes down into a reasonable figure? Well, it’s pretty clear that no one knows hardware like the creators of said hardware, so there’ll be plenty of areas where Nintendo has a head start over everyone else.
However, more importantly, there’s also the limits of the Switch game card sizes themselves to consider, meaning developers, other than Nintendo, will start to rely on Switch owners having an SD card for extra data.
That’s a problem when we remember that the Nintendo Switch has just 32GB of internal storage. It now creates a situation in which an SD card is largely essential, rather than optional when downloading anything other than indie games onto the Switch system.
The saving grace here is that physical Switch game cards don’t require mandatory installs like other platforms, and SD cards are getting cheaper by the day.
Still, if you want a large digital library on the Switch, you’re definitely going to need that extra storage. For all the cleverness of the Switch, this feels like something Nintendo should have addressed before they got started.