Kinda, but I think phrasing it that way overstates how bad it is right now. Generally, you buy a physical game and you get something that’s a reasonably complete product, playable to the end without ever patching.
Basically every game has a patch, but it’s usually minor bug fixes, optimizations, or extra content that’s not so important.
Truly broken and deeply unfinished games shipping on cart/disc are (were?) still kinda the exception.
Truly broken and deeply unfinished games shipping on cart/disc are (were?) still kinda the exception.
DoesItPlay? tries to track this, and they currently list 92% of Switch games being playable without a download. Most of the remanining 8% are games that don’t have all the content in the cart, not games that need a patch due to bugs.
And most likely it’s higher than 92%, since it’s easier to track down the “exceptions” that require download or are broken than it is to test the thousands of available games to say “yes, I played it through using the version in the cart and it worked fine”.
I don’t disagree with what you said and usually nintendo game has better version 1 than many other publishers that requires GBs of day 1 patch. Basically, their game is pretty broken and only past the certification to send to gold. But that’s “in the past”, I am just saying that we should not rely on past experience when comment about the current polices and trends. If nintendo is moving toward key cards, even if it’s something pushed by other publisher, we can and will see the impact of this for other platforms’ physical sales.
This is basically the 2nd round of push to pure digital and that’s nintendo’s attempt.
Kinda, but I think phrasing it that way overstates how bad it is right now. Generally, you buy a physical game and you get something that’s a reasonably complete product, playable to the end without ever patching.
Basically every game has a patch, but it’s usually minor bug fixes, optimizations, or extra content that’s not so important.
Truly broken and deeply unfinished games shipping on cart/disc are (were?) still kinda the exception.
DoesItPlay? tries to track this, and they currently list 92% of Switch games being playable without a download. Most of the remanining 8% are games that don’t have all the content in the cart, not games that need a patch due to bugs.
And most likely it’s higher than 92%, since it’s easier to track down the “exceptions” that require download or are broken than it is to test the thousands of available games to say “yes, I played it through using the version in the cart and it worked fine”.
I don’t disagree with what you said and usually nintendo game has better version 1 than many other publishers that requires GBs of day 1 patch. Basically, their game is pretty broken and only past the certification to send to gold. But that’s “in the past”, I am just saying that we should not rely on past experience when comment about the current polices and trends. If nintendo is moving toward key cards, even if it’s something pushed by other publisher, we can and will see the impact of this for other platforms’ physical sales.
This is basically the 2nd round of push to pure digital and that’s nintendo’s attempt.