The problem was Nintendo charged publishers more money for the larger carts. So a lot of publishers simply took the option of the smallest cheaper cards and made you download the rest.

Trying to preserve Switch games by buying the carts has been a bit pointless really. I know Diablo 3 was entirely on the cart, publishers were very pleased with that.

[–] graymess@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

This kind of thing didn't used to bother me at all before it very much bothered me and now I'm somewhere in the middle. I think cartridges/discs for consoles should not require an Internet connection to play them. That said, this isn't the PS2 era anymore. Many games release with patches day 1 and most will have at least some updates post launch. A lot of games kept offline end up missing out on a ton. Keeping a physical copy of a game is only preserving a portion of the game for a future without the servers to supply the final version, which is my main concern when it comes to physical vs digital media. We still have to rely on hacked consoles running custom firmware or emulation to properly preserve games.