 So, a conversation that GameSpot had with the Elder Scrolls Online Game Director, Matt Ferrar actually exposes an issue for Nintendo Switch that I hadn't considered, and I've heard some people whisper about it, but I always thought it was overblown, and it's an issue that I don't really know what the simple solution is to it, at least for creating a system that can play games anywhere like Switch likes to tout, and that is because Matt Ferrar made this statement on why Elder Scrolls Online will not be coming to Switch. He said, we have thought about Switch, but Elder Scrolls Online is an enormous game and it just will not work. I would love for it too, because I love Switch, it is one of the largest games ever made and it just will not fit on Switch. And he's not talking about in terms of world size and visuals and graphics and capabilities, that's not really what he's talking about, he's actually talking about the file size of the game. Elder Scrolls Online is like 80 gigs, 90, some people claim it's over 100, it's a game that's ever growing like any other MMORPG, it's not a game that ever shrinks. As more contents added, the game file size just keeps growing and growing and growing. Heck, I think my World of Warcraft file size at this point is like 150 gigs or something and that game came out in 2004. The point is that the reason that he doesn't think it can come to Switch is because of the file size. And it's not so much because Nintendo doesn't have 64 gigabyte carts ready or anything like that, it's that that still wouldn't be enough, even with a physical copy at 64 gigs, you'd still have to download like an additional 50, 60 gigs. And it's just going to keep growing from there. And it's an issue that I think is almost wholly unique to Switch, yes. Obviously on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, there are games that have massive file sizes. In fact, Red Dead Redemption 2, which just came out today, so congratulations to everyone playing what appears to be probably the runaway game of the year. That requires like 100 gigs on PlayStation 4, like the base model. If you have an Xbox One X, the file size is even bigger because you're using 4K textures. Now yes, these games brought to Switch running at lower resolutions would be smaller, but not so much so that we're talking about massive shrinking of file size. We're not talking about taking like Red Dead Redemption 2 from say 100 gigs down to, you know, something more manageable at 20, we're talking like 100 gigs down to 90 maybe. This is an issue that Switch has because when you get games that are this big, and it's not just because of physical versions, when you look at like the digital versions, it becomes an issue because not only does Switch only have 32 gigabytes of internal storage, the storage you need to store one of these games on your Switch is not exactly cheap. Even when you get it on sale, say you get a 128 gigabyte cart, right? You get it on sale for, I don't know, let's just say you only paid 15 bucks, 10 bucks, right? You got very, very lucky on a flash sale. Well, for that 10 to 15 bucks, you get to store one of these games, just one. And if you want to play most other games, you'd have to swap out that cart for something else. You want the 400 gig cart, well, you probably spent at the best sale price I've seen it. Let's assume that you got at the sale price I put up a few weeks ago of $100, right? So you got that 400 gig cart, 100 bucks. Well, guess what? Elder Scrolls Online has taken up a quarter of that and that game is going to keep growing and keep growing and keep growing. And it might grow to the point where that 400 gig cart you have, a vast majority of it has to go to a single game, which is not going to be acceptable in a marketplace where you're trying to allow people to have as many games as possible. So yeah, well, it's awesome that Nintendo Switch supports the micro SD card format. It's not necessarily a feasible format for today's gaming space. For today's gaming landscape, games are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And you can hate that, but that's just the reality. It's been an ongoing thing for decades. Games went from kilobytes to megabytes to gigs in a hurry and it just keeps growing and growing and growing. Game file sizes aren't really shrinking, guys. They're getting bigger and Switch is not really built to handle that. It's not so much the internal storage because Nintendo is not going to add a crap load of internal storage because it would almost be more expensive than micro SD cards. But Nintendo does not support external hard drives. Why doesn't it support external hard drives? Well, because the Switch can't use that external hard drive when you're on the go. Now, I do think supporting external hard drives solves some of the complaints here that Matt Furr has from Bethesda where Switch isn't feasible, doesn't really have the space. And if you allowed two, three, four, ten terabyte external hard drives, spinning just hard drives that are cheap, I think that solves a lot of the concerns with that in terms of playing the Switch at home. But a lot of these people don't want to be like, hey, you can buy this game for Switch, but you can really only play it at home. That's not the way people really want to sell their games. They want to be able to market it on Switches. Hey, you can take it off the dock and take it anywhere with you. You're not just locked to only play it in docked mode, especially for a game as big as the Elder Scrolls Online or a game like, you know, Red Dead Redemption 2. And I think it's an interesting conundrum we find ourselves in because I don't know what the solution is. The storage medium doesn't really exist at an affordable price for a portable form Switch to really handle something like this. Even when you have like those 512, you know, you know, gigabyte phones, right? You have 512 gigabytes of storage. How much of those phones cost again? All right, usually they're creeping up towards $1,000 or more. And a huge chunk of that increase is just off of the storage price. So Nintendo is to be like, hey, let's just put 500 gigabytes of flash storage in the Switch. It might jump from $300 to $600 or $700. And that's just using the same specs. So it's not really something feasible for Nintendo Switch to offer an internal storage solution. And as awesome as micro SD cards are, a lot of people aren't going to want to buy like the Elder Scrolls Online and then have to buy, you know, $100 plus, you know, micro SD card just so they can install that game, but still be able to install other games. Obviously, some people are going to be willing to just buy a bunch of smaller 128 micro SD cards and just keep swapping them. But that's obviously not an ideal situation. And it's not something that I think Bethesda really wants to see mixed in. Now, obviously, there's workarounds for this. They can make it so the game's physical only, which does limit the sales, but would also eat up some of the storage issues. You know, let's say they opt for the biggest card size available at 32 gigs. It still would leave like 60 gigs to download. But maybe, you know, they put it on a card and then maybe they include a 128 or whatever micro SD card in the box and then they charge you, I don't know, what would they charge for this game, $80, $100 or whatever to get it. I'm not exactly sure what a price point is where they would be willing to actually sell it physically on Switch if they're including the micro SD card and they're including the largest size Nintendo Switch card. And that is a possible solution. But again, none of this idea, none of the issue with storage on the Switch does not actually, you know, properly solve all of the issues. Now, I know someone out there is going to be like, yeah, well, you know, it should just be on there for people who do have the 400 gig, you know, size or people who are willing, like, obviously having the game on the platform is better than not. But I do think you need to understand this from the publisher and developer side of things where they look at it as, look, we have to invest money to get this game on Switch knowing that it's going to have all of these limiting factors due to the storage. And we can't be sure that the marketplace is really going to be accepting of the fact that a vast majority of Switch owners will not be able to properly play this game. They won't be able to download the full update for the physical version or they won't be able to fit the digital version on current storage mediums on Switch for a lot, a lot of Switch owners. Obviously there's outliers, people who just money's not really the object. They have the 400 gig. They're waiting for the 500 that's coming out or is already, I think there's a 501 already out. So maybe they're willing to spend the money on the 501. And yeah, the Switch supports up to a potential of two terabytes, but those cards don't even exist right now. And can you imagine what a two terabyte micro SD card is going to cost? I mean, you're talking five, six, $700 for something like that. So I sympathize a bit here with Bethesda Stance. And it makes more and more sense why a lot of these super large AAA games are just not feasible on Switch. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 don't move. They're stationary consoles. They include 500 to a terabyte of storage. And even that, some users are complaining that this is a lot of storage for those systems. And they can fit them internally on their internal storage. And you can use cheap external storage in addition to those systems to expand the storage ad infinitum. Heck, if you really want, you can open the consoles and install new hard drives and increase the storage that way. So I'm actually curious if you guys have a solution out there for this storage problem. Maybe there's a solution to this. I have not considered that solves this for everyone. And I think probably the one solution people are gonna say is Nintendo should just release a standalone Switch that only works in docked mode. So it only works on your TV. It's not portable and that solves everything. Or Nintendo should just make a traditional home console and then this becomes a non-pactor. But ultimately, I think part of the Switch's success, part of Nintendo's success, is that they have this platform that does both and does it seamlessly. And yes, guys, I know there are some games that only work in portable mode. And I think there's even a select couple of games out there that only worked in docked mode. But none of those games are major titles. Even stuff, even stuff like Pokemon Let's Go, Picture Let's Go, Eevee, which is intended to be used with your TV can be played on the go. Super Mario Party, while you can't play it, like handheld wise, you could still take it off the dock and play it in tabletop mode. So it's limited, but it's not entirely not portable. You could still play the game portably in some form. You don't have to be locked to your TV, you just can't play in all of the proper forms on the go. So while there have been games that have had these little restrictions, we're talking about a game that's basically you could only play it at home, period. Or you can take it on the go for a very small percentage of Switch owners that actually have the storage for these kind of games. And can you imagine that these games are coming out regularly? If we got to Kingdom Hearts 3, and that ended up being 80 gigs, if you got Red Dead Redemption 2 at 100, you got Elder Scrolls Online at 100 plus because it keeps growing, it's something that's hard to fathom the Switch can handle. And it does show one of the major limitations, not from a tech perspective in terms of specs and GPU and CUDA cores, and all the things that people like to focus on, like why can't Switch have cold duty like us for? Because of this and the other thing, it's still technically possible to get those games to run on Switch. But what does get in the way is storage. And yeah, what's your guys' solution to this? This clear issue. This isn't even about the cost of carts at this point. And Nintendo does intend to eventually release a 64 gigabyte cart, but that doesn't solve this problem either. And most developers aren't even willing to use more than eight gig cart. So how are they gonna convince a third party? Hey, use our most expensive cartridge. We're gonna charge you an arm and a leg for it. We're gonna charge you $10, $15, $20 to even use those carts. I, oh man, it's an interesting conundrum and it kind of sucks because I think a game like Elder Scrolls Online makes a lot of sense on Switch in terms of the game itself being a very interesting prospect for the platform. Obviously Redemption 2 is probably never coming to Switch, but it would have been interesting to see them attempt to bring it to Switch. Imagine being able to play Red Dead anywhere, even if you can't play it at like that best looking visual settings you're seeing on all the other platforms. It would be cool to still have that experience on the go. Would it not? But unfortunately, just storage-wise alone, it's just not really something that is wholly feasible. And yeah, I mean, part of me wants to not accept the excuse because again, there are ways that Nintendo could enable external storage or play under TV, but at the same time, I'm trying to look at the other side of the coin and be like, yeah, that really limits your audience. So I don't know. You guys, let me know what you think about this down in the comments below. I am Nathaniel Rovedjens from Nintendo Prime and if you liked this video, hey, hit that like button. In fact, you know what's awesome about when you hit that like button it actually helps the video out. It actually makes the video, believe it or not, I found this out quite recently from my MCN that when people like the video it actually sends out more notifications to more of the people actually subscribed to my channel. 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