Game-key cards are different from regular game cards, because they don’t contain the full game data. Instead, the game-key card is your “key” to downloading the full game to your system via the internet.
Pay a premium for a physical copy of your game, and the cartridge may not contain the actual game. Only on Nintendo Switch 2.
Now you’ve got me curious what capacity a UMD form factor could achieve with a UHD Blu-ray laser.
Good question. What was the UMD, 1GB? From the DVD default, which was 4GB single layer and 8 dual layer? Blurays are 25GB single layer,so 25% of that is like 7gigs, which is still smaller than the 16gigs the larger Switch carts were. But hey, a lot of games on Switch were smaller, dual layer discs would get you almost to the same size and be a fraction of the cost.
Well, the discs would be. I have no idea how much the weird plastic caddy on UMDs pushed the price up.
I always thought UHD used a different laser than standard blu-ray, but only just found out it was a trick of h265 encoding and triple layer discs.
Based on the mini-BD format, assuming triple layer, the upper limit would have been around 24GB.
Oh, I missed the UHD bit, right. Triple layer it’d cap at 20-25, yeah. Technically Switch carts were available up to 32GB, but I think like one or two games ever used that much, they were so expensive. That’s where the partial download stuff comes in.
Of course for optical media the solution was always to ship multiple discs, because the smaller discs are so cheap. Or were. With most optical media manufacturing phased out who knows how expensive optical will become.